Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

-----which is about dealing with human suffering, that is, starting from that point and trying to do something about it.

Seamus Heaney was a giant in both Irish world poetry and to try to do justice in words to someone who was a master of words is quite intimidating. Anything Members say in this Chamber will be poor tribute to the enormous poetic and literary achievement of Seamus Heaney and in some senses, the most important thing one would wish to say about Seamus Heaney is to read his poems and to reread his poems again and again and to experience the richness, the beauty and the power of words when they are in the hands of a master poet and wordsmith. I believe Seamus Heaney's work is a body of work that when taken as a whole, is an unparalleled word painting of modern Irish history and society from the 1960s right up until his death. It is, however, a word painting of that history from the particular perspective of an individual, of a sensitive human being and of a writer trying to grapple with the conflicts, difficulties and problems of that history and society.

Before I became involved or was dragged into politics, I was a student of English literature in UCD and my ambition was to be a poet. Right from the outset, Seamus Heaney's writing inspired me. At the time, I was a student living in a little flat in Sandymount and I was even more thrilled to find, in Gleeson's pub in Ringsend, Seamus Heaney and his wife sitting in the corner enjoying a pint and listening to the traditional music being played there. I of course was blown away by poems like Death of a Naturalist and the great power of his writing was the manner in which he wove together wonderful images of family, of his childhood, of place and of people with the great political concerns, the great conflicts and the great problems, of history as he experienced them and as he felt the need to try to dig beneath and get beyond such conflicts to some sort of better place. In that sense, a poet to whom I was speaking on the telephone beforehand said that in a way, he was a utopian. He was a passionate utopian who yearned-----

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