Amid the coverage of Anne Enright’s Man Booker Prize win for The Gathering (which I might get around to reading), it has been mentioned that this is the second time the prize has been awarded to an Irish woman, the first being Iris Murdoch in 1978 for The Sea, The Sea.An illuminating article by Murdoch biographer Peter J Conradi that appeared in The Guardian in 2001 revealed that the Dublin-born author held staunch–to say the least–opinions about the country with which she unflaggingly identified herself, even in the wintry depths of Alzheimer’s:

In October 1979, in her journal, she noted approvingly a letter from the writer Honor Tracy, who, though Catholic, wrote: “It is the Stone Age ferocity of the native Irish Catholics in the north which bring these atrocious deeds about… The amount of sheer humbug is breath-taking, and when you think what it has lost in lives and cripplings and blindings. But you know all this.” Murdoch was able henceforth wildly to lose her temper about Ireland. After they had argued about Ireland in 1983, she wrote to one old friend, the philosopher Mary Midgley, to defend Paisley, who, said Murdoch, “sincerely condemns violence and did not intend to incite the Protestant terrorists. That he is emotional and angry is not surprising, after 12-15 years of murderous IRA activity. All this business is deep in my soul I’m afraid.” She now evinced the laager-mentality of the Ulster Protestant who, she felt, had no hinterland, unlike Northern Irish Catholics. No occasion is recorded on which she allowed that the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland had, in 1968, distinct and legitimate grievances.Ireland became “unthinkable”. It was certainly unwriteable. She tried in early drafts of The Book and the Brotherhood (1987) to confront within it an Irish Catholic and an Irish Protestant, but the story took off in a different direction. Labour policy on Northern Ireland was a leading cause in her voting Tory in the 1980s. In 1982 she remarked, “It’s a terrible thing to be Irish.” In The Sea, The Sea (1978) the Northern Irish character Peregrine Arbelow, before his death at the hands of an unidentified sniper, says that “being Irish is so ‘awful’ that even being Scottish is better”.