Each year the pupils of Clongowes and Portora Royal School, Enniskillen compete for the Beckett-Joyce award, which honours two of our most famous writers and helps to link the schools which they each attended. In 1997 the late Seamus Heaney was the adjudicator for the prize, which was won that year by Daniel Bennett from Clongowes. Seven years later Barry McStay (OC’2004) won the award in his final year before taking a degree in English Literature and History at Trinity College. Since then Barry has pursued a successful career as an actor, written his first full-length play and is working on several others as well as performing improvised comedy along the way.
Barry attributes a great deal of the artisitic impetus that propels and compels his life to Clongowes, where he was provided with several outlets that satisfied his literary energies. Writing recently in his blog ‘Dazed in the Life’ (http://bazmcstay.wordpress.com/), Barry paid tribute to the passing of Séamus Heaney. He vividly remembers learning ‘Mid-Term Break’ at school with the late great Fr Joe Brereton, while ‘A Constable Calls’ was the first poem Martin Wallace had his class study before the Leaving Cert. Barry also recalls being struck, even then, by the evocative language of ‘The Skunk’: “Every Irish school child has a relationship with Heaney which, often against our will, permeated us. It’s only now he’s dead that his profound power and depth of his reach has been revealed to us.”
Barry has penned his own tribute to Heaney and we are proud to publish it here:
We Write Poetry
– for Séamus Heaney
__________________________
and we write poetry again
because we must –
the imperative impressed
by he, anyman and everyman
and just a man and what a man.
today your words spring and burst
on social networks,
spattered with mud, blackberry stains,
mildew patterns and swirls
on a dampening wall –
skunks and Tollund Men,
blacksmiths and black bicycles,
schoolboys and lover-boys –
parading half a century of us.
a pride, a grandfather,
a lighthouse, a keeper,
a teacher to us all
when we were taught early,
caught early in a cobweb
of words and wonder
and gifted knowledge of ourselves –
of the troubles we create
and the imaginings we sigh
and the chances we take –
you knew us better than we did
and we were lucky.
and no one knew we’d lose you
but we know it now you’re lost
and follow you into the dark
just to glimpse your sparks
and hear your whinnying
and taste your tang again.
you caught us off guard
and blasted a nation open
so we can do nothing
so we write love-letters
because we must
and, because of you,
because we can.
