Jim D'Arcy (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I can remember vividly attending the first production of "Dancing at Lughnasa" in the Abbey Theatre and the impression it made on me. I was attending with my then new wife. Even today the play is still in my mind. We are talking about the transience of life and the permanence of art. It is said that Brian Friel was greatly influenced by Chekhov. In "The Circus Animals' Desertion" Yeats said, "I must lie down where all the ladders start/In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart". Chekhov said all art starts in the dunghill. There is also the image from outside Kavanagh's house, the carn aoiligh as it is called in Irish. That is the basis of the genre, the everyday, the local elevated to the universal. As Kavanagh said, the local is far more important than the provincial because the local has a justifiable pride in its own achievements whereas the provincial tries to aim its efforts at its perceived betters.

Brian Friel's school colleagues were Seamus Heaney and John Hume - the three wise men - the three whin bushes that looked across the horizon, to quote from Patrick Kavanagh's poem "A Christmas Childhood". One is looking at something special, a unique communication. An uilethacar - the universal set, which will live forever. When, as the Leader outlined, Brian Friel said that he hoped "that between now and my death I will have acquired a religion, a philosophy, a sense of life that will make the end less frightening than it appears to me at this moment", I though he was a very lucky man because he only feared the end. Most of us fear life. I am sure there is no end as far as Brian Friel is concerned because he has moved through his art into that permanence that will last forever.