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

Absolutely. He also took positions on things that mattered to him and got involved in them. He was a supporter of the anti-apartheid movement. He took a stand on the issue of protecting the Hill of Tara when the motorway was being built through it and he of course wrote the poem, From the Republic of Conscience, as his contribution to International Human Rights Day and was a supporter of Amnesty International. Consequently, his politics was a commitment, as was his poetry, to our shared humanity and to trying to look to a place where we could get beyond some of the conflicts and disputes, that is, to a better place in which our shared humanity would be at the centre of what we did and how our society was.

It also is important to mention he was extremely popular among many diverse writers, including those who perhaps had a different perspective on many things. I spoke to one such writer earlier, who is a much more politically engaged poet, but who recalled that he received his first bursary award from a board on which Seamus Heaney sat. He made the point that Seamus Heaney never was open to the idea of there being competition between poets but that he wished to nurture, encourage and support poetry of all kinds, as well as to assist younger poets and to uphold the importance and relevance of poetry to the world in which he lived. He certainly achieved that in spades, to coin a phrase.

If I may, I will conclude with the poem by him that inspired me. It probably is his most famous but it truly inspired me and sums up everything he set out to do and did during his life, namely, Digging.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:

My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds

Bends low, comes up twenty years away

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills

Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.

Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner's bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I'll dig with it.

He dug a rich vein.

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