When Seamus Heaney died three years ago, the sense of loss was not just profound. It was shared – between both parts of the island, between both communities in Northern Ireland, between Ireland and the rest of the world. In his luminous poetry, in his public demeanour and in his generosity of spirit, Heaney had given great dignity to ordinary Irish life. As the greatest artists do, he had taken the familiar and made it strange and wonderful. He reminded us that our reality is not one dimensional, that day-to-day life is also illuminated by memory and hope and even, sometimes, by the miraculous. Even people who very seldom read poetry were acutely aware that he had given us something precious and left us greatly in his debt.
On August 17th the North’s minister for infrastructure, Chris Hazzard of Sinn Féin, issued a bland announcement of his “decision to proceed with the £160 million A6 Randalstown to Castledawson Dualling scheme”. This may seem of little broader consequence – except that the new dual carriageway and its spur roads will be driven straight through the heart of places that have a radiant presence in many of Seamus Heaney’s best-loved poems: Mossbawn, Anahorish, the shores of Lough Beg. This is a terrible mistake, one that in future years will seem as incomprehensible as it is careless.
Seamus Heaney was no enemy of the motor car. On the contrary, his poems often seem to be imagined from behind the wheel. “Just drive/For a day” is his remedy for the absence of inspiration in The Peninsula. He would have nothing against the improvement of a poor stretch of a roadway that is important to development west of the Bann. But if his legacy means anything it is that we must keep room in our lives, public and private, for something beyond the immediate and the pragmatic. There is a balance to be struck and in this case the balance is the one suggested by Heaney himself – that the new A6 should, for this unique stretch, take an alternative route through a disused brownfield site.
Elsewhere in today's Irish Times Fintan O'Toole writes about the importance of this landscape for Heaney's work. A petition against the routing of the A6 through Anahorish has been signed by Irish and international figures including Michael Longley, Martin Hayes, Sinéad Morrissey, Helen Vendler, Colm Tóibín and many others. Heaney's Co Derry landscape is as rich in cultural meaning as the areas of Co Sligo that will forever be associated with W.B. Yeats. The duty of preserving it is no less obvious.
Most Irish people were and are proud of Seamus Heaney and grateful for the grace he brought to times that were sometimes dark and disgraceful. A decent way to honour him would be to honour and protect the place that shaped his marvellous imagination.