Hundreds attend Heaney funeral

Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny leaves after the funeral mass of the Irish poet Seamus Heaney at the Church of the Sacred Heart in Donnybrook in Dublin, Ireland, yesterday.

Guardian News and Media/Dublin

Seamus Heaney was a “great democrat” who could mix with kings, presidents and the ordinary people of his native County Derry, mourners at the poet’s funeral were told yesterday.

The Nobel laureate’s friend Monsignor Brendan Devlin said Heaney “could speak to the King of Sweden or an Oxford don or a South Derry neighbour in the directness of a common and shared humanity”.

Devlin, who is a family friend, said the Heaney circle were suffering an “immeasurable sense of loss” over the 74-year-old-poet’s death last week.

Rock stars mixed with presidents and prime ministers, politicians, poets and painters as around 1,000 people packed into the Heaney family’s parish church in the Donnybrook district of south Dublin.

Among those filing into the Church of the Sacred Heart were the four members of U2: Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen, along with their partners. They were joined by the president of Ireland, Michael D Higgins, the taoiseach, Enda Kenny, his deputy prime minister Eamon Gilmore and the former president Mary McAleese.

Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams represented Sinn Fin at the funeral.

Other mourners included the former Beirut hostage and author Brian Keenan as well as the folk singer Paul Brady whose songs reflected in music the concerns and pain of the Northern Ireland Troubles that Heaney wrote about in so much of his poetry.

The Hollywood star Stephen Rea and Paddy Moloney from the Irish traditional folk group the Chieftains were also in the congregation. Among others from the Irish literary world were one of his oldest friends and fellow Northern Irish poets Michael Longley.