This chapter examines the degree to which Northern Irish poets can establish an authorial presence in their texts and how authoritative they feel when, ‘mired in attachment’, they write about politically sensitive issues. Since a quotation establishes a gap between the quoting text and what is quoted, its effect on the poet's authoritative voice is ambiguous: even if a quotation is used as an embellishment, ‘a mere appendage to the main discourse’, it is also ‘paradoxically privileged, as it appears as a stylistic exemplum’. Similarly, if the citation is used as auctoritas, then ‘the quoted text is privileged over the text and author quoting’ and forces him ‘to relinquish temporarily his mastery over his own discourse and to subordinate himself to a more authoritative writer who has expressed what he wants to say in a way he cannot even attempt to equal’. Is literary allusion, therefore, used to invoke the authority of literary exemplars, conferring legitimacy upon a poet's ideas? Does quotation devolve responsibility from the poet to another writer, allowing the former to ventriloquise controversial sentiments through the latter and absolve himself from all consequences? Does this subsume the poet's originality? Is quotation used simply for ludic purposes, a whimsical piece of allusive pomposity? Or does its inclusion self-reflexively call into question the validity of the source text, asserting an essential difference, rather than similarity, between the original and new contexts? This chapter seeks to answer these questions by focusing on how the citation of exemplary figures has been central to the representative discourses – historical, sociological, pictorial and poetic – surrounding the so-called ‘dirty protest’ and resultant Long Kesh hunger strikes. I have chosen these events in particular because concepts of authority – political legitimacy and the use of quotation – were so central to them.

In an Irish context, the hunger strike as a weapon of redress is afforded a modicum of respectability owing to its historical precedents; indeed, the hunger-striker is often cast in the role of heroic victim once situated within a mythic paradigm.