Susan O'Keeffe (Labour) | Oireachtas source

Minister, Marie, distinguished poets and guests and my friends from the Yeats Society in Sligo, thank you for being here to share in this moment. It is very difficult to pay tribute to a man of Seamus Heaney's immense stature. I am honoured to stand here as a Senator and to be able to contribute.

At his death, the Irish Independent described him as the best known poet in the world. In 2008, Harvard University, in trying to explain his immense popularity, especially among younger people, said that they were not teeny-boppers, but Heaney-boppers. That Seamus Heaney was a great poet is in no doubt. The American poet, Robert Pinksy, said that Heaney had the gift of the storyteller.

I only came to know him a little bit in person in very recent years, but I knew him long ago from his poems and was always touched by how his words allowed me to reach out to a real world, to reach into his world and to begin to make sense of my world. Rather than trying to confound or impress people, Seamus just wanted to share what he saw, felt and understood. He did this by telling the story of his life, the landscape, the weather, the earth, the light, the cold, his mother, his father, the berries, the ferrets, hares, turf, milk, horse, cart, the smells and the feel of steel and wood. Always the simple things - the clatter of the stones, a kingfisher's blue bolt at dusk, a snipe's bleat, the cold smell of potato mould. All lines of magic, so many lines of magic. We have been handed a treasure trove of a mind that could always tell the wood from the trees.

He could write all of this because he wrote from the heart, from where he had been, from where he was, from where he knew. His sense of self was very strong and remained so all his life. Whether he was writing about the pitchfork, the ash plant or his beloved blackbird, he had not read it in any book or thought it might be cool. No, he had been there, and those things had burned an image, smell or sound on his conscious memory.

Seamus was a man who never lost touch with who he was and what he wanted to say. His sense of his own voice was always strong. He always understood and knew where his roots were and he never shied away from them. There was nothing post-modern about Seamus. He did not reinvent himself for a quick headline or a fast buck. He was always true to himself and to poetry. His authenticity beamed out from him along with his great, warm smile. His poetry always felt believed in, not made for money or fame, not crafted for a prize or a promotion. It was simply what Seamus loved and believed in and what he wanted to do. It was important; it mattered. He knew that the voice of the poet was an essential voice in society and that, somehow, now he was that voice. The scholarship boy had won the greatest prize.

He knew, too, that this was the most special prize. As he told The Paris Review some 20 years ago, he had always expected to have a job, but the most unexpected and miraculous thing in his life had been the arrival in it of poetry as a vocation and almost as an elevation. He never lost sight of the responsibility that this miraculous thing had thrust upon him. In 1993 at University College Swansea, he said that the poet who would be most the poet had to attempt an act of writing that outstripped the conditions even as it observed them.

As a colleague, Ms Aoife O'Driscoll remembers meeting him at the fourth annual human rights lecture in 2009 when there was much conversation about the attack on the flotilla to Gaza by the Israeli army. Ms Mary Robinson spoke about that event. She had just come from a meeting of the elders in South Africa. As Aoife remembers it, Seamus was standing next to her and listening to Mary. He had his left hand on his face. She said that he had an intense and calm look when Mary stopped speaking. He said that one could just imagine the ships in that moment, on the sea, the people staring at one another, their fear, their excitement, their terror on their faces, but there they were staring and waiting. Then, he said suddenly, almost abruptly, that poetry was the thing that made us blink. It was that moment.

Seamus Heaney knew that he could not hide in the fields and barns of his childhood. The Troubles and the political conflict of his native land were something that he knew he had to talk about, to deal with, to include in his poetry. In 1972, in the dedication of his collection Wintering Out, he wrote these stark words:

This morning from a dewy motorway
I saw the new camp for the internees:
a bomb had left a crater of fresh clay
in the roadside, and over in the trees
machine-gun posts defined a real stockade.

The "articulator of the years of pain in the North" was how his old friend, Monsignor Brendan Devlin, summed up Seamus's poetic contribution about the North at his funeral. Writer and critic, Mr. Blake Morrison, said that Heaney's response to the Troubles showed that he had taken on the mantle of public spokesman. Yet he did all of this work without trying to be important himself. He did it because it was important for us.

His original pseudonym as a writer was Incertus, meaning "Uncertain". While he was quickly able to throw that name aside and write as himself, he retained some level of that uncertainty. By this I mean that he was never so certain of himself and his contribution that he belittled others or saw himself as better, superior or rather grand - a Nobel winner after all. Those of us lucky enough to have spent even a small time in his company understood that immediately.

I am no academic. I never wanted to parse and analyse Heaney's lines. I never felt that I needed to drill down into it because it drilled into me. Somehow, I always thought that I knew Seamus before I met him because I felt that he was speaking to me when I read his poetry and that he was telling me about his life. Or, as he said simply, making sense of a life from a time that he described as not really the 20th century at all, but rather a medieval country where water was carried from the well and horses ploughed the fields. He was talking about his beloved Bellaghy.

Seamus Heaney had a long, strong and wonderful relationship with Sligo and that other Nobel prize-winning poet, William Butler Yeats. Indeed, there is no argument that Seamus Heaney is the greatest poet since Yeats, whom he was able to read as a young boy in his aunt Sarah's house. She had a three-volume collection of Yeats's plays and poems. Sitting in the dark of the Hawk's Well Theatre on 4 October this year at the 54th Yeats International Summer School, one could have heard a pin drop and every seat was filled with those of us lucky enough to hear Seamus Heaney's last public reading. His mind was, as in the words of Henri Cole in The Paris Review 20 years ago, alert and mischievous, firm but funny, sharing, enjoying the moment, contemplating his work, reading with his magical, mellifluous voice that itself was a gift.

His association with the Yeats Society stretched over 40 years. He first came to read in 1970 as a young poet with just one published collection. In the words of Ms Stella Mew, the stalwart of the Yeats Society, he came and came and came back to Sligo, winter and summer, to run workshops, lecture and read, and to acknowledge Yeats but, above all, to inspire and support another generation of poets and poetry lovers and to share his own love of ideas and words and his absolute belief in the power of poetry and its place in Ireland and the world.

Do I have a moment?