The City’s very own Nobel Prize Winner, Seamus Heaney, has said he is delighted that ‘the town we love so well’ is in the running to become the City of Culture 2013.

Seamus Heaney, a past pupils of Derry’s St Columb’s College, is the literary genius behind unforgettable works like the poetry collection, Death of a Naturalist and the play, The Cure at Troy.

Seamus said: “It is good to know that Derry City Council and Ilex are proposing ‘the town we love so well’ as the 2013 City of Culture.

“It seems to me that the omens are encouraging, in that the 400th anniversary of the building of London’s Derry could be read as a symbolic handover of cultural authority from London’s 2012 Cultural Olympiad. And if the omens are good so too is the entomology: Doire is the oak, as is Ilex, but another word for it is robur, which is also the word for ‘strength.’

“Yet the strength of Derry’s application is based on more than words. Preceding the Plantation of Ulster, there were already over eleven centuries of Gaelic cultural achievement: Colmcille remains significant as a culture hero on both sides of the North Channel and the image of his own monastic foundation/plantation on Iona is a potent reminder that links between the Ulster Scot and the Ulster Gael have a deeper and longer and more positive import than recent history might suggest.”

Seamus, also the winner of the 2006 TS Eliot prize, says he believes that since the cessation of violence 15 years ago civic life in the city has improved immensely.

He continued: “Political developments have led to a burgeoning confidence that has affected citizens at personal and public levels. Even in darker times, there was always something tonic about the spirit of people here, but prospects of a better future have strengthened resolve, and signs of progress are evident in all spheres of life not least in the cultural area where the presence of a world dramatist like Brian Friel is a source of pride and enterprise and the legacy of the great John Hume is inspiring and pervasive.

“At the beginning of the Northern Ireland troubles, the poet John Montague wrote – with specific reference to events in Derry/Londonderry – that ‘old mould are broken in the north.’ It seems to me that we now have a timely and unique opportunity to demonstrate to ourselves and to the world that a new mould and a new life have been shaped in the meantime. The prospect of Derry/Londonderry as City of Culture helps me to credit anew those hopeful lines of the poem/chorus first spoken in public on the stage of the city’s Guildhall in 1990:

So hope for a great sea change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a farther shore
Is reachable from here.

“The award of City of Culture would certainly bring us closer to that desired landfall.”

Ends