Irish Artists Reflect on Art and Resilience During Northern Ireland's 'The Troubles'

Four distinguished Irish writers from the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast brought their experiences of growing up during Northern Ireland’s decades-long conflict to UT Social Work on Oct. 30, exploring how art helps process trauma and build resilience.

UT Social Work and its Office of Global Engagement hosted “Constructive Dialogue, Poetry and Social Imagination,” featuring novelist Glenn Patterson, poets Leontia Flynn and Dawn Watson, and visual artist Rachel Brown. Andy Langer, program director for the Moritz Center for Societal Impact, moderated the dialogue before students and faculty from across the university.

The conversation reflects themes central to UT Social Work’s “From Texas to the Troubles” graduate program, which will take students to Northern Ireland beginning in summer 2026 to study constructive dialogue and leadership in divided societies. The two-phase program immerses participants in Austin and Belfast, working with community leaders and practitioners shaped by the Troubles.

Each artist shared memories of growing up during “The Troubles” — the conflict that claimed more than 3,500 lives before the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 — and how that turbulence shaped their creative voices.

Flynn opened by noting that art in the time of conflict operates under a different set of priorities.

Patterson, director of the Seamus Heaney Centre, pushed back against how we measure conflict. “Other conflicts that affected more people don’t get the same attention. Conflicts affect one plus one plus one,” he said, emphasizing how statistics erase individual lives. “Art invites you to imagine the one.”

Brown, who grew up in rural Northern Ireland, remembered a childhood that contrasted sharply with her Belfast peers: waiting each morning while her father checked under the family car for explosives before driving her to school. She referenced her recent work, “These fleeting temples we make together” — a meditation on the threshold between individual and collective experience.

Watson reflected on art’s power to bridge divides: “Specifics can be paradoxically universal. A single image can bring everyone together.”

An engaging Q&A followed, with students and faculty exploring how art metabolizes conflict and creates space for dialogue across difference.

The conversation was made possible through the support of Robert Hull, consul general of Ireland, Austin, and Jenny Browne, MFA, 2018 Texas Poet Laureate and 2020 Fulbright scholar at Queen’s University.