Fiach MacConghail (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I extend my welcome and fáilte to Marie and I extend my sympathies to Mick, Christopher and Catherine as well. Our loss does not compare to the loss of Marie. We share that. I support all the emotion because it is important in this cynical age that emotion is seen as a valid response to bereavement and loss. It is also a response to events and the passing of Seamus Heaney is an event as well as a moment of personal and professional grieving.

I cannot say I knew him well but his extraordinary generosity made me feel that I was one of his closest colleagues and friends. I worked with him as director of the Abbey Theatre. We produced his play "The Burial at Thebes". That play, along with "The Cure at Troy", demonstrated how he understood and supported theatre and the politics of theatre, and how theatre could communicate issues of justice, politics and equality. Often there was a mild accusation that Seamus was not political. In fact, he was quite the opposite and he used the power of poetry to be allegorical, mischievous and challenging. That is one of his greatest legacies.

This is a wonderful occasion today because it is all-Ireland poetry day. What a wonderful occasion for us to be celebrating not only Seamus Heaney but poetry. I extend my welcome and fáilte to Professor Brendan Kennelly, David Hanley, Terence Brown and other colleagues here. I acknowledge that the community of poets in this country are also bereft and at loss because one of their brethren, a colleague of theirs, is no longer with us.

I will read one of his poems that was commissioned by Amnesty International, From The Republic Of Conscience. He remarked on it in a wonderful book of conversations - another of his legacies - with Dennis O'Driscoll, who, sadly, is also no longer with us. Heaney said that he remembered a poem by another writer that helped him to get started, in this case, by Richard Wilbur, and that he used Wilbur's poem Shame to do a little commissioning himself. He said that Wilbur made an allegory of Shame by turning it into a small cramped country. During the previous term, Heaney asked the Harvard students in his workshop to write a poem based on it. Then it occurred to him that he could ask himself to do the same thing, to make up an imaginary country to represent a particular state of mind or feeling. Once the job was presented in those terms, the element of play entered and he was able to cross the frontier of writing and shift out of the doldrums of what happens. Amnesty International had sent him some reports about the injustice and suffering endured by prisoners of conscience in different parts of the world. All he could do at first was quail before that evidence. No cry he could have made in verse could have matched what was crying out in the dossiers. He had to recover and "by indirections find directions out".

The poem was read recently by another south Derry artist, Eleanor Methven, who was a member of the cast of "Major Barbara", which we ran in the Abbey Theatre. On the morning that we heard of the passing of Seamus, Eleanor read it on the stage of the Abbey Theatre and there was a standing ovation afterwards as a way to mark his passing:

From The Republic Of Conscience
I
When I landed in the republic of conscience
it was so noiseless when the engines stopped
I could hear a curlew high above the runway.

At immigration, the clerk was an old man
who produced a wallet from his homespun coat
and showed me a photograph of my grandfather.

The woman in customs asked me to declare
the words of our traditional cures and charms
to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye.

No porters. No interpreter. No taxi.
You carried your own burden and very soon
your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.

II
Fog is a dreaded omen there but lightning
spells universal good and parents hang
swaddled infants in trees during thunderstorms.

Salt is their precious mineral. And seashells
are held to the ear during births and funerals.
The base of all inks and pigments is seawater.

Their sacred symbol is a stylized boat.
The sail is an ear, the mast a sloping pen,
the hull a mouth-shape, the keel an open eye.

At their inauguration, public leaders
must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep
to atone for their presumption to hold office -

and to affirm their faith that all life sprang
from salt in tears which the sky-god wept
after he dreamt his solitude was endless.

III
I came back from that frugal republic
with my two arms the one length, the customs woman
having insisted my allowance was myself.

The old man rose and gazed into my face
and said that was official recognition
that I was now a dual citizen.

He therefore desired me when I got home
to consider myself a representative
and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue.

Their embassies, he said, were everywhere
but operated independently
and no ambassador would ever be relieved.