Hundreds, including U2, farewell poet Seamus Heaney in Dublin

THE funeral mass of Irish poet Seamus Heaney was celebrated in Dublin by a congregation including rock superstars U2.

IRELAND-HEANEY-UNIVERSITY

THE funeral mass of Irish poet Seamus Heaney was celebrated in Dublin on Monday by a congregation including rock superstars U2.

Heaney, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, passed away aged 74 on Friday after a short illness.

Considered to be one of the English language's greatest poets and Ireland's finest since Yeats, Heaney released his first collection, Death of a Naturalist, in 1966.

He went on to publish several collections of poetry and literary criticism and was awarded the Nobel prize for literature "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past".

The chief celebrant of the mass, Monsignor Brendan Devlin, told the packed church that Heaney put into words like no other the suffering and agony of the three decades of sectarian bombings and murders in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles.

"When we read that series of sharp-witted paradoxes that we call the beatitudes it cannot but strike us how many of them apply readily to our memories of Seamus Heaney," Devlin said.

"How blessed are those of gentle spirit; those who hunger and thirst to see right prevail; those who show mercy to others; those who want to see peace established - how much of that is a description of the man we knew, of the brilliant literary critic, of the articulator of the years of pain in (Northern Ireland)."

Hundreds of people crammed into the church of the Sacred Heart in Donnybrook in Dublin to pay their respects and the mass was broadcast live on television and radio.

Irish President Michael D. Higgins, himself a poet, and Prime Minister Enda Kenny were among the mourners as well as all four members of U2, and Heaney's fellow-Irish poet Paul Muldoon and playwright Brian Friel also attended.

Heaney, who is survived by his wife Marie and three children, will be laid to rest at Bellaghy Cemetery in Derry.

Although primarily a poet, Heaney was also a highly regarded academic and served as professor of poetry at Oxford University and as poet-in-residence at Harvard University.

His work covered a vast array of topics, including the conflict in Northern Ireland, nature and the flaws of the human condition.

"It was Seamus Heaney's unparallelled capacity to sweep all of us up into his arms that we are honouring today. Today we mourn with Marie and the children, the nation, the wide world," Muldoon said in a tribute.

"I remember the beauty of Seamus Heaney, as a bard of course, and today, in particular, in his being."