Seamus Heaney, poet and Nobel laureate, has lived in Sandymount for the past twenty-three years. Armed with the name of the road, a vague description of his house and a mysterious brief ‘find the panama hat’, I set out on my trusty bicycle to track the famous man down.

My mission – to persuade the world-renowned poet to discuss his life in Sandymount. Some time later, my carbonised lungs screaming for respite from the traffic fumes and not a scribe in sight, I was no closer to my goal.

Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a panama hat shining brillant white through a window. Bingo! The hunt was over as Seamus Heaney, ever the courteous gentleman, kindly found the time to answer some of my questions.

The first one concerned the reasons for the Heaney family’s move to Dublin and more specifically Sandymount.

In 1972, then living in Belfast with his wife Marie and children, an opportunity arose to take a cottage in Glanmore, County Wicklow where Heaney could commit himself in earnest to his writing.
An idyllic four years ensued. But by 1976, the family had concerns similar to many others.

“Our eldest son, Michael was ten, Christopher eight, and our youngest, Catherine was three. I had to think ahead about schools and all that, so we decided to move to Dublin. Very deliberately, we decided to look for a place somewhere between Monkstown and Irishtown”.

Sandymount was eventually chosen “because of the strand, and because it is so well placed – on the edge of town, and not all that far from the country. I liked the breathing space offered by the strand”.

The children were able to attend nearby schools. “The boys eventually went to St Conleth’s on Clyde Road and Catherine went to Booterstown.”

However, it wasn’t only the scenic location or proximity to the city centre which led him to Sandymount. “I also liked the sense of community around Sandymount, Irishtown and Ringsend”.
This sense of belonging to a community was obviously important to the family as “from the start my daughter Catherine and I always bought our Christmas tree at Coady’s in Irishtown”. Moreover the kindness of new acquaintances and neighbours has not been forgotten. “I remember Mr. Olin, the local plumber, being very good to us when we arrived.”

Of course, much has changed for Seamus Heaney since he took a teaching job in Carysfort College in 1975 “to pay the mortgage, since freelance earnings were meagre and unreliable”. The growing appreciation and popularity of his poetry, both with the critics and general public alike, led to an increasing international profile and deserved financial success, culminating with the Nobel Prize in 1995.

Nevertheless, he believes “my lifestyle, such as it is, hasn’t changed that much over the past twenty-three years I’ve been here. We live quietly and appreciate very much the way people have let us do so.”

“Of course, there was a terriffic sense of congratulation in the air at the time of the Nobel Prize. My face was all over the papers, but there was absolutely no intrusion. I admired the graceful way everybody gave a smile or a nod of the head, but didn’t overdo it – with flattery – or with abuse for that matter!”

Consequently, despite his celebrity status, he can still enjoy the same local activities as before. “Admittedly, since the family have grown up I don’t go to the local chipper, Borza’s on the Green, as much as I used to. But I still turn up in O’Brien’s off-licence now and again. I am very fond, too, of Gleeson’s public house on Bath Street. And I go for a walk every now and again on the South Wall.”

Much of his work has been written in his Sandymount home. How conducive has this location been to the creative process of writing? “Last year, I got a skylight into the attic at the front of the house and that has made a great difference to me. I work in the attic, and the view over the bay, the wide outlook over waves and shore and shipping, is very heart-lifting and head-clearing”.

But, despite the strong sense of personal experience and place in his poetry, he agrees that he has written very little about Sandymount itself.

“Partly that’s because it belongs so completely to James Joyce: he’d be a brave man who’d try to do better than his chapter in Ulysses. But it’s mostly because the places that inspire me are in the past, in my memory. And when you come to think about it, it was the same with Joyce. There’s nothing about Zurich or Paris or Trieste – the places where he lived when he was writing – in the writing itself. The memory life of Dublin and the remembered places brought him to his senses as an artist.”

1999 was another busy and successful year for our own celebrated artist. Contrib-utions to the Millennium include patronage of ‘The Whoseday Book’, a unique millennium journal in aid of the Irish Hospice Foundation. His translation of ‘Beowulf’, the 8th century Anglo-Saxon epic poem, has been recently published to great critical acclaim. It is his first major publication since winning the Nobel Prize four years ago.

Last month, he was also awarded The Irish Times Literature Prize for Poetry for ‘Opened Ground’, a collection of his poetry spanning three decades from 1966 to 1999.

When asked what differences he has observed in Sandymount over a similar time-frame, he responds with a topic familiar to many locals.

“The biggest changes I have seen are in the price of houses and the volume of traffic. Now don’t start me off on those issues or we will never finish!” Enough said.

Despite the increasing pollution and threat to Sandymount Strand, its beauty and influence remain undimmed in the following lines written by him:

“The dotted line my father’s ashplant made
On Sandymount Strand
Is something else the tide won’t wash away.”

It is safe to say that Seamus Heaney has left his own indelible mark on the literary history of Sandymount.