Fiach MacConghail (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I would like to say a few words about the recent death of Brian Friel, the master and a giant of world theatre. I understand time can be set aside for Members to pay tribute to great leaders of our nation, of whom Brian Friel was one. Will the Deputy Leader set time aside to pay tribute to him? Brian Friel was a Senator in the 18th Seanad between 1987 and 1989, as a Taoiseach's nominee. He has the record of not having spoken a single word. For such a prolific writer, he kept his own counsel and never said one word in the Chamber during this period. Is binn béal ina thost. He was born in Omagh, County Tyrone in 1929. His working relationship with the Abbey Theatre and other theatres dated back to 1962 when "The Enemy Within" had its world premiere. Other premieres at the Abbey Theatre included "The Freedom of the City", "Volunteers", "Living Quarters", "Aristocrats", "Dancing at Lughnasa", "Wonderful Tennessee", "Give Me Your Answer, Do!" and, of course, "The Loves of Cass Maguire" and "Faith Healer".

Brian Friel began his career as a short story writer, but his play, "Philadelphia, Here I Come!", revolutionised Irish theatre. Plaudits followed over the course of a long and prolific theatre career in the form of the London Evening Standard Award for "Aristocrats" and again for "The Home Place" in 2005, which was staged at the Gate Theatre, a Tony award in 1992 and an Olivier award in 1991 for the massively successful "Dancing at Lughnasa", as well as a lifetime achievement award from The Irish Times. He was also a Saoi in Aosdána. As a co-founder of the Field Day Theatre Company in 1980, he worked with a number of other seminal artists, including Seamus Deane, Stephen Rea and Tom Kilroy, to provide a theatre company for Northern Ireland and particularly for Derry in the middle of the Troubles. It opened with a premiere of another extraordinary seminal play, "Translations". His legacy is a collection of plays which interrogate language, family, religion, history and our concept of what it means to be Irish. These works will resonate with future generations.

I consider Brian Friel to be one Ireland's greatest nation builders who forensically interrogated and challenged the establishment of the Republic of Ireland. He understood the power and ambiguity of memory in developing a sense of who we are as a people and a nation. His work constitutes a living, evolving history of Ireland. Here was a playwright who was striving to ensure the past never became fossilised and deeply aware that it was not the literal past, the facts of history, that shaped us but images of the past embodied in language such as in "Translations". His loss is deeply regretted not only by his family, including his wife, Anne; son, David; daughters, Sally, Mary and Judy, but also his friends and colleagues across all theatres in Ireland, Britain, elsewhere in Europe and the United States, from Broadway to Los Angeles and from Ballybeg, the mythical site of Glenties where all his work was based, to the Abbey Theatre. However, in his own words, we are now invited to a place where words are no longer necessary.