THE family of Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney have said that plans to build a centre dedicated to his life's work in Bellaghy are ideal as the area was the "wellspring of his work".
Family, including Marie Heaney and the couple's children, were among guests at a special viewing on Monday of the under-construction Seamus Heaney Home Place centre in the Co Derry village where the late poet spent his formative years.
Heaney died at the age of 74 in 2013 and is buried in St Mary’s Cemetery in the village.
Other guests included family members who still live in south Derry and former friends, including poet Michael Longley.
The £4 million project, which has been part funded by the old Department of Culture Arts and Leisure, is in the final stages of construction on the site of a former RUC barracks on the outskirts of the village.
Plans for a ‘opening year programme’ were also revealed at Monday’s event.
The programme will include music, poetry, staged readings drama, talks, discussions, visual art and installations.
Each month after the opening, which will take place later this year, the programme will focus on one of Heaney’s 12 main collections.
His son Michael said Bellaghy is the perfect place for the new centre which will house a permanent exhibition, artefacts, photographs and recordings, including some of the poet reading his own words.
“It’s a huge thing to have it in Bellaghy,” he said.
“I spent summer here and things like that but it’s not my home but it was dad's home so to have something like this here, it just makes sense. It’s the wellspring of his work.
“So it’s hugely important that it’s here because this was, as it where, the imaginative home for him, it’s a huge thing in that way.”
He said Co Derry held a special place for his father up until his death.
“There was definitely a pull south Derry had on him, that you get when you grow up somewhere and it was heard in his work to the very end.
“All bar one of my uncles live within five miles of here and that’s the other reason it is just so important and so right that it's here.”
Lifelong friend and fellow poet Michael Longley paid a warm tribute and read from Heaney's poem Personal Helicon. He said the new centre will attract fans of his writing.
“Seamus Heaney wrote great poems, so he was a great poet,” he said.
“He wrote immortal poems, so he is an immortal poet.
“This building, the Home Place, will become an echo chamber for the poet’s beautiful lines.
“The radiant words that emanated form his solitary vocation will turn visitors to the Home Place into pilgrims.”
There was controversy last year after the Irish News revealed that Coleraine based architects firm W&M Given was directly awarded the Heaney centre contract as well as eight other contracts valued at £22.75m between 1995 and 2014.
Chairman of Mid Ulster District Council Cathal Mallaghan said £100,000 has been set aside to carry out regeneration work in Bellaghy.
He described the new centre as “significant” and suggested the contracts controversy is now in the past.
“That has all been dealt with, documented and reported,” he said.
