 One of the big visitor attractions now in Northern Ireland is the £4.25 million Seamus Heaney Centre in Bellaghy in South Derry, known as Seamus Heaney HomePlace, which opened on September 30, 2016. It celebrates the life and achievements of Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), one of the great poets in the English language, whose sudden death on September 30, 2013, at the age of 74, caused a deep sense of loss. There were numerous laudatory tributes and obituaries to him not alone in Ireland, Britain, and the United States, but also around the world, a reflection of his international stature. Seamus was born on April 13, 1939, at Mossbawn, Broagh, near Castledawson in South Derry, but his family moved in 1953 a few miles to nearBellaghy. With his evocative celebration of farm life and customs, he had the talent to exult the local and make ituniversal, as well as capturing contemporary issues. His first collection of poems, Death of a Naturalist, appeared in 1966, to be followed by eleven more to his last, Human Chain, in 2010, as well as prose, translations, plays and edited collections. As well as winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, he twice won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for The Spirit Level (1966) and Beowulf (1999). The Seamus Heaney HomePlace is a wonderful place to explore his family background, his early influences, some neighbours like Barney Devlin, who owned the famous forge featured in Door into the Dark, and some other inspiration for his creative imagination. It incorporates an interactive exhibition on two floors, family photographs, personal stories, artefacts like his original school desk, his school bag, fountain pen, an interpretation of his Dublin study, and the facility to hear the poet himself reciting many of his best known poems as you move about. The centre contains a large illustration of the region around Castledawson and Bellaghy showing the undulating landscape and places that were his boyhood universe and which inspired his keen sense of place. There are many transcripts and books donated by the family on display, as well as compliments from many people in Ireland and around the world. A special section is devoted to how he heard about the Nobel Prize in 1994 while on a holiday in Greece, his homecoming, and the presentation ceremonyin Stockholm. The Seamus Heaney HomePlace has a performance arena, The Pelican, a 190-seater theatre for arts and educational activities like music, drama, song, talks and readings. Overall, the Seamus Heaney HomePlace is a most wonderful tribute to a great son of South Derry. Seamus Heaney’s grave can be seen beside a sycamore tree at the south wall in St Mary’s Churchyard in Bellaghy, close to that of his parents, Patrick and Margaret, née McCann, and a family grave, including that of his four year old brother, Christopher, who was killed in a local road accident in 1953. This tragedy inspired one of his most popular poems, ‘Mid-Term Break’ in Death of a Naturalist , after seeing him laid out in the four foot box, ‘A four foot box, one for every year’. The epitaph on Seamus’s headstone reads: ‘Walk on air against your better judgement’. This came from his poem ‘The Gravel Walks’ in the collection Spirit Level (1996), and it was quoted by him in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Bernard O'Hara's latest book entitled Killasser: Heritage of a Mayo Parish is now on sale in the USA and UK as a paperback book at amazon.com, amazon.co.uk or Barnes and Noble It is also available as an eBook from the Apple iBookstore (for reading on iPad and iPhone), from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk (Kindle & Kindle Fire) and from Barnesandnoble.com (Nook tablet and eReader). An earlier publication, a concise biography of Michael Davitt, entitled Davitt by Bernard O’Hara published in 2006 by Mayo County Council , is now available as Davitt: Irish Patriot and Father of the Land League by Bernard O’Hara, which was published in the USA by Tudor Gate Press (www.tudorgatepress.com) and is available from amazon.com and amazon.co.uk. It can be obtained as an eBook from the Apple iBookstore (for reading on iPad and iPhone), from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk (Kindle & Kindle Fire) and from Barnesandnoble.com (Nook tablet and eReader). |