Seanad debates

Thursday, 3 October 2013

An Appreciation of the Life and Work of Seamus Heaney: Statements

 

12:45 pm

Photo of Fidelma Healy EamesFidelma Healy Eames (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

All those bogland neighbours in Galway. Absolutely. I consider myself very fortunate to have been a student of Seamus Heaney. I attended Carysfort College in the early 1980s. As a 19 year old he supervised, probably, my second teaching practice. Somehow I knew there was a bit of greatness about him because a good friend attended his English lectures. She used to speak to me about his work and on one occasion she told me he had to leave the lecture because the BBC was looking for him. I knew this was no ordinary teaching practice supervisor. He observed my class and he said afterwards it was grand but added, "If I were you I would put in another stage in your teaching". When one is 19 years of age one is doing well to manage a class and one is thinking of just delivering. I am conscious that Senator Marie Louise O'Donnell is present because she was there also in those days. I said, "What exactly do you mean?" He said, "You need to graph it, you need to paint it, you need to engage them so that they discover what it is you want to teach them". For that I was ever grateful. It certainly made me a much better teacher at a very young age. Some 15 years later I became a teacher educator. He was way ahead of his time, even with that piece of advice, because in 1999 we revised the primary school curriculum to imbed that approach.

In every way he contributed much, as Senator Ivana Bacik said. As well as being the ordinary man who made things extraordinary for us, he was also an intellectual and a great teacher. I pay tribute also to Marie because on more than one occasion I heard her read, particularly at the Children's Literature Association of Ireland in the company of that great wizard Robert Dunbar, when she shared with us the stories of the clans of Ulster and the hounds of Ulster. It was, as Senator Marie Louise O'Donnell said, a great union that touched many lives. I had decided to read Mid-Term Break but my colleague has already shared it.

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