Paschal Mooney (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I did not want to let the occasion pass without being part of this unique occasion to mark the passing of one of our greatest poets. What I have been reading is rather interesting. Seamus Heaney and W. B. Yeats shared a legacy that was spoken about in great detail by many people on his passing and it reminded me of the one and only occasion on which I met Seamus Heaney. I was chairman of Fáilte Ireland North West at the time and we were launching the Yeats Trail in Sligo. I had the honour of being with him on that occasion and because it was about Yeats I recall quoting one of Yeats's poems and apologising to Seamus for not quoting one of his but that I had no doubt he would take the opportunity to do so, which he did. I want to express my deepest sympathy to Marie and to all of his family on the loss of an outstanding husband, father and patriot.

I could not help but reflect that one of the poems that struck me as resonating, and we all have our reasons for selecting various extracts from Seamus's anthology, was Sunlight, which he wrote some four years after the death of his mother with whom he had a particularly close relationship. I will not read it all other than to convey the sense of that relationship to which most of us would relate in our own homes:

So, her hands scuffled
over the backboard,
the reddening stove

sent its plaque of heat
against her where she stood
in a floury apron
by the window.

Now she dusts the board
with a goose's wing,
Now sits, broad-lapped,
with whitened nails

and measling shins:
here is a space
again, the scone rising
to the ticks of two clocks.

And here is love
like a tinsmith's scoop
sunk past its gleam
in the meal-bin.

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.