News at Eleven: I asked him to consider if there was anything

he could do on their behalf, if he could add his voice to the growing complaints. For example, Archbishop O Fiaich had, by this time, visited the H-Blocks and, to the embarrassment of the British government, had compared the prison to the sewers of Calcutta.

Seamus [Heaney] told me he was writing a poem and had been thinking about the prisoners. He told me the story from Dante's Inferno of Count Ugolino who was imprisoned with his children and grandchildren underground and left to starve, Ugolino's eating his dead children's flesh to delay his own starvation. Seamus said he imagined that this could be some sort of metaphor for hunger striking though I was lost as to what he meant.

from Danny Morrison: Seamus Heaney Disputed
also The Guardian: Strangers on a train: Heaney and Sinn Féin

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