Seamus Heaney’s last words: ‘Do not be afraid’

“His last few words in a text message minutes before he passed away – in his favourite Latin – were ‘nolle timere’ (‘don’t be afraid’),” Seamus Heaney’s son Michael told the crowds gathered at his father’s funeral in Dublin on Monday.

The celebrated poet’s body will be buried in his home town of Bellaghy, Northern Ireland.

Alongside the members of U2, Irish President Michael Higgins and Prime Minister Enda Kenny were present, as were Martin McGuinness, deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, and Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein. Actor Stephen Rea, Paddy Moloney of Irish folk band the Chieftains, and Paul Muldoon also attended.

‘Say Nothing’

Friar Brendan Devlin described Heaney as a man who could speak to the King of Sweden, an Oxford professor and a neighbour from south Derry.

But speech in Northern Ireland was not always easy – in this Channel 4 News video Heaney reads his 1975 poem ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’ – where he describes the difficulty and danger of talking in the divided country.

‘I can’t keep on writing elegies’

Having lived through tumultuous times for Ireland – political violence in the North and economic strife in the south – Heaney gave an important and unusual perspective on his country.

As Seamus Heaney told Jon Snow in 1999, he was a passionate supporter of the peace process, because difficult though it was, something new had to be done in Ireland. “I can’t keep on writing elegies,” he said.

Ireland ‘is a culture before it is an economy’

The Irish Times’ Fintan O’Toole spoke about Heaney’s perspective on a more recent Irish problem – the economic crisis: “He reminded us that Ireland is a culture before it is an economy…

“In a speech at the National Museum in March, Heaney put it directly, ‘We are not simply a credit rating or an economy but a history and a culture, a human population rather than a statistical phenomenon’.”

The funeral ended with a reading of his poetry and a wreath of flowers from his garden in Derry.

He is survived by his wife Marie and his three children.