Catherine Noone (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Minister, Marie and other distinguished guests, I am delighted to have this opportunity to pay tribute to the late Seamus Heaney, a worthy Nobel Laureate and undisputedly the most globally renowned of modern Irish poets.

Comparisons to Yeats and descriptions of Seamus Heaney as the greatest poet of our age are by no means exaggerated and are richly deserved. I welcome the representatives of the Yeats Society who are here with us today, with whom I understand Seamus was involved for 40 years. Despite receiving the highest accolades by critics worldwide, Seamus Heaney notably never lost the common touch. I was lucky to have met him in Mayo in my family home. He helped us celebrate the George Moore festival a number of years ago. We were thrilled to have him as a guest in our home. It is a happy memory, in particular during the past while.

Former US President, Bill Clinton, recently praised Seamus Heaney as our finest poet of the rhythms of ordinary life. Heaney's poetry possessed an aural beauty and a finely raw texture which he presented with a coherent vision of Ireland past and present. His early poetry collections painted a portrait of family and farm life in County Derry, evoking a hard, mainly rural, life with rare exactness. Seamus Heaney also used his collections, Wintering Out and North to reflect upon the Troubles and sought to weave the ongoing situation in Northern Ireland into a broader historical framework, embracing the general human situation. Bill Clinton also described Seamus Heaney as a powerful voice for peace. Seamus was undoubtedly a symbol of hope and inspiration to many during the Troubles.

Seamus Heaney did not reduce political situations to simple clarity and by all accounts he did not believe his role was as political spokesman. However, the following lines from his play, The Cure at Troy are truly inspirational:

History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

Seamus Heaney's work of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, like that of his fellow Irish Nobel Prize winners, Shaw, Beckett and Yeats, are and will continue to be an enduring gift to the world. Seamus Heaney possessed the rare ability to make one see, hear, smell and taste this life, illustrating that all parishes, rural or urban, are equal as communities of the human spirit.

I propose to recite a poem, Seeing Things, which I heard while visiting Inishbofin on the weekend after Seamus Heaney passed away. Coincidentally, I once met Senator Fiach Mac Conghail on Inishbofin and it was he who suggested that we recite a poem today:

Inishbofin on a Sunday morning.
Sunlight, turfsmoke, seagulls, boatslip, diesel.
One by one we were being handed down
Into a boat that dipped and shilly-shallied
Scaresomely every time. We sat tight
On short cross-benches, in nervous twos and threes,
Obedient, newly close, nobody speaking
Except the boatmen, as the gunwales sank
And seemed they might ship water any minute.
The sea was very calm but even so,
When the engine kicked and our ferryman
Swayed for balance, grabbing for the tiller,
I panicked at the quick response and heft
Of the craft itself. What guaranteed us--­
That fluency and buoyancy and swim--
Kept me in agony. All the time
As we went sailing evenly across
The deep, still, seeable-down-into water,
It was as if I looked from another boat
Sailing through air, far up, and could see
How openly we fared in the light of morning,
And loved in vain our bare, bowed, numbered heads.

I offer my deepest and sincerest sympathies and condolences to Marie as well as to Seamus's children, Christopher, Michael and Catherine Ann.