Léargas

    Seamus Heaney, Warren Thompson, Jimmy Ellis and mise at Sam Thompson's graveside   Seamus Heaney is dead. When I heard the news this morning I was cleaning out a shed. Dirty and dusty and lost in that chore I got the news by text. I was deeply shocked. I stood for a while trying to take it in. I still can’t quite believe it. Although I have known Seamus personally for many years like millions of others I first knew him through his words – and what words. As a result I seem to have known him most of my life. And now he’s gone. Seamus was a national treasure. He was of us with a profound and humane understanding of us as an island people with all our fault lines and flaws and strengths. He was extremely modest, approachable and humble. And until his death this morning the world’s greatest living poet in the English language. His name is spoken of in awe alongside those of Yeats, Joyce and Friel, O Connor and Kavanagh, and O Brien, O Casey and Shaw a...

Atlanta in Georgia is where Martin Luther King was born and where he spent much of his life preaching. In March 2001 I had the good fortune of visiting Atlanta at the invitation of the Ancient Order of Hibernians and Friends of Sinn Féin. I was there to speak at several fundraisers. It is a city inextricably linked to two of the great struggles in American history: the Civil War and the Civil Rights struggle. In 1864, after a four month siege by the Union armies the city surrendered and it was ordered to be burned to the ground by the union general William Tecumseh Sherman. Only its Churches and hospitals were spared. In the 1950s and 60s it was at the heart of the Civil Rights struggle. No visit to Atlanta is complete without walking through the Park and Preservation District. Martin Luther King’s home, where he was born in January 1929, is there. So too is the Ebenezer Baptist Church . It is an imposing brown brick building. Inside I had the opportunity to sit quietl...

The decision by the British Secretary of State, the PSNI and the HET to try to prevent inquest and trial transcripts from being given to the families of three victims of the conflict has again focussed attention on the refusal of the British government to deal properly with victims and their families, and in particular the victims of British state violence. Patrick McAdorey was killed by the British Army on August 9 th 1971; Sarah Larmour was killed by the UVF on October 3 rd 1979 and Michael Donnelly was killed by the British Army on August 9 th 1980. Their families want to know what happened and why. The Minister for Culture, Arts and Leisure Caral Ni Chuilin sought and was given the go-ahead by the north’s Attorney General for the inquest papers and trial transcripts to be handed over to Relatives for Justice and to the families. All of these documents are already in the public domain and were reported in the media at the time. Until 2012, these types of papers were ro...

Brian Stack was the chief officer in Portlaoise prison in March 1983 when he was shot and grievously wounded. The IRA said it was not involved. A year and a half later Brian Stack died as a result of his injuries. Mr. Stack was a married man with three young sons. Since then the family have sought answers to questions about who shot their father and why. At the beginning of May I met Austin and Oliver Stack in Leinster House. They asked for my assistance in seeking answers and closure to questions they had surrounding the killing of their father. I told them I would try to help. From that time I worked with Austin and Oliver to establish whether the IRA was involved in their father’s death. Recently I accompanied Austin and Oliver to a meeting with a former IRA leader who had enquired into the events of March 1983. The substance of his conclusions are contained in the family statement which states that the former IRA leader: “ Acknowledged that the IRA was responsibl...

The stream behind Letterkenny Hospital seemed so innocent and innocuous. There was no huge torrent of water rushing through the culvert. It was hardly more than a small stream of water. It looked harmless and it was hard to imagine that last Friday evening it turned into a tidal wave of destruction that swept through the hospital leaving devastation in its wake. Yesterday morning Padraig McLaughlin TD, and Councillors Gerry McMonagle and Micky McMahon and I visited the hospital to see for ourselves the damage wreaked when the stream burst its banks and contaminated water a metre deep cascaded down through the hospital. Workmen were busy clearing away debris from the stream and from along its course to prevent a recurrence. A n independent civil engineering review is currently being carried out to establish what happened and why, and to make recommendations to ensure it doesn’t happen again.   The Culvert and Hospital But around 5pm last Friday a deluge of rain saw...

 Speaking at MacGill Summer School in the Glenties   Patrick MacGill was born not far from Glenties in south west Donegal. He was a poet and a novelist. At aged 12 he was sent to the Hiring Fair in Strabane where he was taken on by a wealthy Tyrone farmer. Many children of that period in Donegal frequently found themselves in Scotland working long hard hours for little return. MacGill worked on the railway line in Scotland and subsequently called the ‘Navvy’s poet’. He published several volumes of poetry and in 1914 an account of the harsh life of Irish emigrant workers in Scotland. During the 1914-18 war he fought and was wounded as a British soldier. Afterward he continued to write poetry and fiction and drama. As a tribute to this remarkable individual journalist and producer Joe Mulholland, along with some local people, established a ‘summer school’ in 1981. This isn’t a school of the kind we are all used to. It is a special, different kind of ‘school’ ...