“Heaney's version of the world is fine by me. It has to be. It's his. Heaney's version of Ireland and Irishness, however, is a different matter. Heaney's Ireland is a place I've never been, his Irishness is a thing I've never known…Anything that I and writers like me have ever written has tried to be a rejection of the comfortable amiabilities of Heaney and writers like him. I believe those gentilities to be risible and bogus. In a country where platitudes about national consciences are the province of politicians as much as poets, I believe such waffle to be corrosive and dangerous. 

I have some unwelcome facts to face. Me, and writers like me, we're defeated, we're completely trounced. For uncountable years this country will be known through the culture promoted by writers like Seamus Heaney. The cause of alternative voices is not damaged, it is destroyed. The stuff with the hedges and the peat is now what Irishness is. Heaney's mounting of the Nobel pinnacle is merely the underlining of this fact. Thus, on this occasion, I can only greet the new Laureate respectfully, with all my heart. Seamus, we the vanquished, salute you.” Robert McLiam Wilson - Source: Fortnight, No. 344 (Nov. 1995), pp. 23-25.