REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE AWARDS CEREMONY FOR THE FINAL OF THE POETRY ALOUD COMPETITION
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE AWARDS CEREMONY FOR THE FINAL OF THE POETRY ALOUD ALL-IRELAND POETRY SPEAKING COMPETITION
Dia dhaoibh a chairde agus a dhaoine uaisle go léir. Ta an-athas orm bheith i bhur measc anocht ar an ocáid speicsialta seo. Mile bhuíochas daoibh as an gcuireadh agus as an bhfáilte fíor chairdiúil a chuireadh romham anocht. I’d particularly like to thank Anna Boner, Poetry Ireland and the National Library of Ireland for inviting me to this lovely occasion where we get to relish the very best of the 900 competitors in this year’s Poetry Aloud competition.
Wesley College is where Niall McMonagle started the competition sixteen years ago so this is a homecoming for which we thank the Principal Christopher Woods and the board of governors. Like all good ideas this one spread and soon the competition had grown into a hugely popular all-island event.
The Poetry Aloud competition is now itself a competition winner for earlier this year it received from our great Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney the Clarissa Luard Award. Seamus remarked then that this competition promotes literature, and specifically poetry, ‘widely, intimately and to inestimable effect.’ It does what Yeat’s said education should be doing not ‘the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.’ The ignition of a lifelong passion for poetry gives us the gift of a great lifelong companion, with an infinity of voices, identities, moods and personalities. For centuries in Ireland, the file and the seanchai occupied a special place in the social hierarchy, a recognition of the importance of our oral tradition of story telling, of weaving pictures through words, explaining in poetry that which could be only barely and inadequately articulated in any other medium.
Building on that ancient tradition, Poetry Aloud has ensured that schools all over the country have been filled with what Caliban in the Tempest describes as ‘noises, sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.’ It is a wonderful thing to be the bringer of delight to know the joy of the first stirrings of a poem which Carol Ann Duffy describes as ‘a moment of tiny revelation, a new way of seeing something.’ Gray sees poems as ‘thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.’ In truth there are no prescriptions that hold poetry captive. Imagination always will out and through this competition Ireland’s young people are encouraged to believe in themselves not just as readers of poetry but as poets, for every generation needs its poets and mine was and is blessed to have the joy not just of Seamus Heaney but a long list of male and female poets in English and in Irish who coloured our life’s palette with their word brushes.
Long after we have forgotten the mathematical formulae or rules of grammar we learnt at school our minds will recall a line, a verse from a poem lodged in our minds long long ago and which has kept us company over a lifetime. We may even hear in our heads the voice of the poet him or herself. That voice is an integral part of this competition and each competitor, each winner is privileged to join in what Seamus Heaney has referred to as ‘the hammered anvil’s short pitched ring, the unpredictable fantail of sparks’ - the creative act of poetry made to be read and made to be listened to.
Once again, may I congratulate this year’s award winners and wish them every success in the future.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.