Mark Daly (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I recite Requiem for the Croppies by Seamus Heaney:

The pockets of our great-coats full of barley
(No kitchens on the run, no striking camp)
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
A people, hardly marching - on the hike -
We found new tactics happening each day:
Horsemen and horse fell to the twelve foot pike,
We'd stampede cattle into infantry,
Retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown
Until, on Vinegar Hill, the fatal conclave:
Twenty thousand died; shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August barley grew up out of the grave.

The principal of my national school in Kenmare, Donal Sleator, taught me that poem. He was a great man for poets, including Pádraig Pearse, whose poem, The Wayfarer, contains the line "And I have gone upon my way Sorrowful", and Joseph Mary Plunkett, whose poem, I See His Blood upon the Rose, contains the lines:

I see his blood upon the rose
And in the stars the glory of his eyes

Seamus Heaney is not up there among the greats; he is one of the greats and is up there with all our poet laureates and all our Nobel Prize winning poet laureates. He came to Kenmare many times for a festival of culture and, to be honest, there used to be quite a bit of drinking as well. As often happens, everyone claims he or she came up with the idea but it was Joseph Thoma, who was a great teacher but he could not teach me art. I suppose it was never in me, so he could not get out of me what was not in me. My fellow Kerryman over there would point to another great Kerryman, the late Con Houlihan, who said one of our great Kerry poets was making all the right mistakes. I was making all the right mistakes. Joe Thoma came up with an idea that Seamus Heaney and Liam Ó Maonlaí should recite poetry together accompanied by music. Kenmare is claiming credit for where it happened first. It then happened in many auspicious locations, including in Carnegie Hall in New York.

Over his life, Seamus Heaney gave us great words and he was a wordsmith of monumental and global proportions. I will conclude with the words of Pearse that we shall all go upon our way sorrowfully.