Des gathers artists for tribute to a poet friend

A friendship that started on the first day of school over 60 years ago lasted until one of the men died last August.

Neither Seamus Heaney nor Des Kavanagh knew then how their lives were going to turn out. Certainly neither of the two 12-year-old boys could have guessed that one of them would be a Nobel Prize winner whose poetry would touch many lives in the Western world.

Bereft of that friendship and knowing Seamus’ love of Galway, Des decided to organise a tribute, a night which would certainly celebrate the poet’s life and work.

Des, a retired orthodontist whose practice in The Crescent continues to be run by his son Conal, was thrilled at the positive response from the local arts community to his idea and the line-up fell into place beautifully.

That tribute takes place in the Bailey Allen Hall in NUIG on Wednesday, February 26 starting at 7.30pm and offering a feast of literary stars, including actors Stephen Rea, Sean McGinley and Marie Mullen, poets Moya Cannon, Mary O’Malley and Rita Ann Higgins as well as musicians Martin O’Connor, Brendan O’Regan, Jimmy Higgins, Kathleen Loughnane, Mary McPartlan and many more.

Des reads poetry every day and has even published his own work but it wasn’t poetry that brought him and Seamus together.

They met on their first day of boarding school at St Columb’s in Derry. Their cubicles were side by side in the dormitory and they were placed at the same table. They were both country boys. Seamus was from Mossbawn in County Derry and Des was from Inishowen, Co Donegal, and they got on like a house on fire.

The school’s mission was to produce an educate a class of men who could work in the professional and business sectors of Northern Ireland to counter Unionist domination.

Des’s class was indeed an impressive one. Other classmates included Seamus Deane who went on to become a poet and critic as well as a professor of UCD and Notre Dame in the US, Hugh Braiden who would be Professor of Scholistics in Queens, Paddy Mullarkey who would become Secretary General in the Department of Finance and Eamon O’Doherty, architect and sculptor who created the Galway Hooker in Eyre Square.

“Seamus was exceptionally bright who distinguished himself academically. He was very good at English and he was in the top three in most subjects. But he was also socially very affable and agreeable, good humoured and incapable of causing offence,” recalls Des.

“We both thought we had a great sense of humour and we both loved to mimic the teachers – when they were out of earshot of course! Of course Seamus went on to become a great actor too. If any of us had imagined Seamus making it big, it would have been as an actor not a poet. Sure we didn’t know anyone then who was a poet. We were studying all British poets at the time,” he adds.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.