Olivia O'Leary: 'Seamus Heaney: Part of What we Are'

A capacity audience gathered in St Patrick's College Auditorium last night for the Inaugural Lecture in the Sixth Seamus Heaney Lecture Series, ‘Hearing Heaney’. In a scintillating address journalist and broadcaster, Olivia O’Leary, delivered a humorous, passionate and wide-ranging reflection on the influence of Heaney’s poetry on her own life and work as a journalist, and on his contribution to public and political affairs in Ireland over the last four decades. ‘Seamus Heaney has held a mirror up to Irish life over a long number of years,’ she said at the outset. Heaney’s negotiation of the conflicted nature of Irish life, North and South, was one of his key achievements and allowed him to explore the ways in which Irish life ‘is often lived in two minds’. She also showed how one of Heaney’s great gifts has been to use poetry as a means of ‘revisiting the story again and again, so that we gain a clearer understanding of life’s events’. ‘Heaney makes us proud of who we are precisely because of the quiet confidence he exhibits in his chosen canvas’. Olivia O’Leary drew her detailed reflections on Heaney’s life and work to a close by remarking that ‘his poems have helped expand borders and landscapes. He has, in particular, expanded our imaginative landscape to include Northern Ireland and has avoided dwelling too much on some of our running sores.’ Fiach Mac Conghail of the Abbey Theatre chaired the evening with consummate ease and presided over a lively, half-hour’s discussion which followed the lecture.

The next lecture in the current series entitled 'Between the lines: the Writer's Heaney' takes place next Monday 7 February and will be delivered by Vona Groarke.

 

 

 

Last Updated: Tuesday February 01 2011