The Heather Blazing

Critically acclaimed Irish author Colm Tóibín’s second novel, The Heather Blazing (1992), revolves around an emotionally closed off Irish High Court Judge, whose life spans most of the twentieth century. He has thus lived through dramatically changing Irish attitudes toward history, religion, and sexuality without being able to connect with the world around him, instead, only dwelling on the minutiae of the law. The novel’s chapters alternate between the judge’s late years, as he looks back over his life, realizing how much he has missed by keeping himself disconnected, and his childhood and youth in the 1940s.

The novel’s title comes from the line “a rebel hand set the heather blazing” in the Irish ballad “Boolavogue,” a rebel song about “the insurrection by the United Irishmen in 1798, which began with idealistic speeches in Belfast about the need to unite Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter but subsequently degenerated into sectarian violence in Wexford.” This sectarian division and its repercussions on the political movement of Irish Republicanism – especially the activities of the Fianna Fáil party, which devolves from its initial idealism and austerity to corruption and nepotism – form part of the backdrop of the protagonist’s life.

Although the novel mixes and interpolates its two time frames, this summary will recount the events in chronological order.



Eamon Redmond is born in the early 1930s to an educated but poor family in the relatively small town of Enniscorthy. He suffers the loss of his mother, who dies while he is still a toddler. Raised by his schoolteacher father, Eamon learns to be self-sufficient, “to wait, to be quiet, and to sit still.” As he grows up, he learns about his family’s history of involvement in the Irish Republican movement: his grandfather had been imprisoned by the British, and even his mild-mannered father had raided the mansions of Protestants as part of the Fianna Fail party.

When Eamon is a young teenager, his father suffers a stroke during Mass. The boy is crowded out from his father’s side by the rest of the congregation, and without really realizing what has happened to his father, Eamon goes home alone to cope as best he can by himself. Only in the evening, after he has tucked himself in with a blanket on a sofa, do the townspeople come to find him to tell him that his father is still alive. For the rest of his youth, he cares for his father while trying not to be bothered by other students mocking his father’s now-impaired speech. Later, his grandfather and a favorite uncle die within a week of each other.

These traumatic losses make Eamon retreat from emotional intimacy altogether. This seems somewhat charming in a young man, and he does end up meeting and marrying Carmel, a woman whom he loves but whom he keeps at a great distance, unable to fully open himself up to her or to express his feelings. They have two children, son Donal and daughter Niamh, both of whom become estranged from their father during their adolescence. He regrets this but is unable to do anything about it.



Eamon is highly intelligent, and after joining the Fianna Fail party, he parlays his contacts into a legal career. He buries himself in legal work and is extremely successful professionally, eventually rising to a judgeship on the Irish High Court.

Each year, Eamon and Carmel travel to their summerhouse in the seaside town of Cush, in County Wexford. There, Eamon prefers to be alone; he has deep emotional ties to the landscape where he spent his summers as a child, and which is now slowly crumbling. As a nearby cliff face collapses, taking a neighbor’s house with it, Eamon feels the threat both to his memories and to the environment around him.

Before one trip down to Cush, Carmel tells Eamon that their unmarried daughter is pregnant. At first, she decides on an abortion, but then changes her mind, intending to be a single mother. Eamon’s reaction is typical: he doesn’t say much to comfort Carmel, who is worried about Niamh’s distress; and he refuses to engage in any conversation about what this will mean for their family.



The next year, when Carmel tells him that Niamh and her new baby will be coming with them to Cush, Eamon is annoyed by the baby’s crying. Uneasy, he retreats into himself, thinking about a recent opportunity he had to make a dramatically impactful ruling in a case involving a pregnant school girl. Although the option was there for him to issue a ground-breaking decision that would “radically reinterpret a few clauses in the sectarian Irish constitution, originally introduced by his namesake Eamon de Valera in 1937,” Eamon decides not to act. He is simply not the kind of man who could parlay the fact that he has stopped believing in the religious and patriotic ideology he grew up with into a reach for new moral ground. He hopes neither his wife nor daughter will ask him about this court case.

Carmel suffers two strokes, and in the absence of any demonstration of warmth from Eamon, she accuses him: “You don't love me...you don't love any of us.” However, the true sadness is that, in fact, Eamon cares for each of them deeply. After Carmel’s death, he finds it unbearable to be in the house. Instead, he takes long walks in which he imagines doing everyday things like shopping with her. He rues his inability to ever offer her the emotional connection that she so clearly wanted and needed from him.

The novel ends with some hope for the last part of Eamon’s life. Worried about their father after their mother’s death, his children come to visit. Sensing a thaw in him, Niamh and her toddler stay after Donal leaves. Eamon slowly connects to the baby, getting past his tantrums and eventually teaching him simple fun things, like playing with a bowl of water. The last image in the book is of the judge carrying his grandson on his shoulders on the beach while Niamh swims in the water nearby.