Brian Ó Domhnaill (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Marie to the Seanad this afternoon. It is fitting that the House is paying tribute today to a man who will always be remembered as an Irish legend. Born in April 1939, shortly before the beginning of the Second World War, in a farmhouse known as Mossbawn between Castledawson and Toomebridge in County Derry, Seamus Heaney moved to Bellaghy in 1953 as a teenager. He came from ordinary beginnings deep in the Derry countryside.

Seamus Heaney's contribution to Irish life can only be described as extraordinary and brilliant. He has been described by many Senators as one of Ireland's greatest and that description is not an understatement. Many academics and Irish, European, American and world leaders have spoken of the man he was. Seamus Heaney came through the Troubles in the North and they shaped, in large part, his professional outlook and literature. He was described by Robert Lowell as the most important Irish poet since Yeats, a sentiment echoed by the academic, John Sutherland, who described Heaney as the greatest poet of our age. Everyone here will agree with that description.

As previous speakers noted, on 1 September 2013, a crowd of 81,533 observed a minute's silence and applauded for several minutes at the all-Ireland football semi-final in Croke Park. This was a fitting and appropriate gesture given the magnitude of Seamus Heaney's influence on Ireland and its people and the importance we, as a nation, place on our cultural and historical identity. President Michael D. Higgins, the former United States President, Mr. Bill Clinton, the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, and leading lights in literary and academic circles paid tribute to Seamus Heaney on his death. Colm Tóibín wrote the following appropriate words: "In a time of burnings and bombings Heaney used poetry to offer an alternative world", while the former US President, Bill Clinton, acknowledged not only the greatness of Heaney's work but, more important, its influence in bringing about peace in our time. This influence cannot go unrecognised.

I acknowledge the Minister's proposal to recognise the wider contribution of Seamus Heaney. It is an excellent idea, particularly as Seamus Heaney was an extremely generous man who gifted the State his literary notes in December 2011. I understand he and his son, Michael, packed the notes in boxes and donated them to the State. They are an enormous contribution to the State and a great reflection on the man.

Seamus Heaney will always be remembered as a great Irishman and Gael who influenced the cultural identity of our nation. In the poem, Digging, from the 1966 volume, Death of a Naturalist, he reflects on his past and brings it into the literary work that was to shape poetry in this country and the minds of generations of young people in the classroom who learned about poetry through his writings. I will recite some of the lines from Digging:

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.

Ar dheis lámh Dé go raibh a anam uasal.