Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I would like to welcome Michael, Seamus's secretary, Susan, and her husband, Ciarán, to the House.

As Friday mornings go, it was busy. Those with young families were out early, buying the last of the books and lurid lunchboxes. Everybody here was making calls, lists and readying offices for the start of the new term, all of us noticing the change in the light. All day, word of his death broke radio schedules, consciousness and the heart of a nation. It was, indeed, sad news. There would be no one now to keep the gap from Joyce's salt strand to Molly Bloom's rhododendrons and roses, or the Fianna's Binn Éadair. From that day, there would be no man marooned in his own loft, a birch planted 20 years ago between him and the Irish Sea, searching, as he put it, "for that one piece of language that fits exactly". And as he sought, so he found.

It is almost two years now since Seamus, Marie, Michael, Christopher and Catherine Ann gifted us those finds in the Heaney archive. Again, the light was changing. It was Advent, the winter solstice, in fact. On that day, we were given a gift beyond precious metal, incense or ointment, or all they signify. It was a gift from one who could disarm kings, inspire presidents, heal hurts, break hearts, make cures at Troy, burials at Thebes and miracles out of all of us, and out of all that we are and were and could be, at Anahorish, or on a tube in London, or watching our fathers dig, or peeling potatoes with our mother, or as a new family of Europeans, united through the unstrange word at the Fionn Uisce, the Beacons at Bealtaine. For him, it was only all and ever about memory and "the state of us".

So much has been written and said about Seamus Heaney in the last 26 days: oceans - continents - of words. In the media there was the particular eloquence of Theo Dorgan, Fintan O'Toole and Andrew O'Hagan. In the church at his requiem mass, we held our breath, the building itself seeming to catch itself and to listen, as Paul Muldoon shared his impeccable and devastating observations on heartbreak, general and particular, on the matter of Seamus Heaney's beauty, on the matter of his being kind and decent, and the greater business of his being the first and eternal champion of his daughter, Catherine Ann. In that moment Paul Muldoon made them every father and every daughter, because every father and daughter, present or watching, recognised in the story and its telling the power of something that was not just a life gift but a birthright. Inevitably, the politics of birthright was the backdrop to so much of Heaney's work.

In the days since his death, the lines about "hope and history" have rhymed across the world, as private and public figures reacted to the news. For me, however, it is what Seamus Heaney says about his translation of Dante's Divine Comedy that best sums up his very particular and considered view of the poetic and the political:

Poetry, let us say, whether it belongs to an old political dispensation or aspires to express a new one, has to be a working model of inclusive consciousness. It should not simplify.

Its projections and inventions should be a match for the complex reality which surrounds it, and out of which it is generated.

Across the world Seamus Heaney was and is seen not alone as Ireland's better self, but, I believe, its best self possible. It is a self alive to and alive with what he called "the potency of myth". In June, he spoke to the Paris Revue de Belles-lettres about "journeys to the underworld", not alone in Dante, but also Virgil and Homer:

The potency of the myth was [he said] a way of imagining something ongoing ...Christian myth is so contentious and exhausted ... I find that there were underworld journeys where the shades of the people you knew are met. I find it deeply, archetypally satisfactory. You don't need to believe in an "afterlife" but you get some kind of satisfaction ... I find Virgil simply beautiful, the various encounters with the lost people.

Today, I am certain he has met them, for they are his people as they are ours, those links in the human chain. Today, we miss and mourn and yet celebrate the incomparable Seamus Heaney. We give thanks joyously, graciously and humbly for the gift of him in our national life. He who was our voice, our hearth, our "home".

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