SPEECH BY THE PRESIDENT, MARY ROBINSON ON THE OPENING OF THE KAVANAGH LITERARY RESOURCE CENTRE
SPEECH BY THE PRESIDENT, MARY ROBINSON ON THE OPENING OF THE KAVANAGH LITERARY RESOURCE CENTRE ON THURSDAY, 16TH JUNE 1994
It seems exactly right to call this a resource centre because Patrick Kavanagh himself has proved to be such a resource - and not simply to readers and students of poetry. His eloquence and obstinacy are still with us. His sense of the local is all around us. Inniskeen is the place he loved; this is the place where the fictional Tarry Flynn looked at his fields with so much attention and affection. And it's on the Inniskeen road that the bicycles went by in twos and threes, and where Kavanagh felt he was king "of banks and stones and every blooming thing". So Inniskeen can rightly claim him and truly be proud of him.
And yet at the very heart of Dublin, on the greenest bank of the canal at Baggot Street, he can be claimed almost equally. In the middle of the traffic you can turn your head and just catch a glimpse of his statue there on the bench and think of his line "O Commemorate me where there is water". I was very honoured to unveil that seated Kavanagh beside his beloved canal.
There is something we should celebrate today. Here was a poet who was unsparing and unflattering and loving in a uniquely Irish way. If he loved his native place he was still capable of telling harsh truths about it. And though he never forgave Dublin for not being Inniskeen, he still discovered and recovered it for those who came after him. His ability to reveal to us the places he loved and we now live in was so complete and so powerful that we are likely to forget the sort of artist he was. But it should be remembered today and always. This was the poet who saw "the spirit-shocking wonder/ in a black slanting Ulster hill". Who spoke of the barges bringing mythologies from Athy into the plain and downright heart of a capital city.
The reason he did this so movingly is part of the reason we honour him today. There is a great temptation for us, especially in Ireland, to turn our writers into accessories of our national pride. To be comforted by their eloquence and stature without remembering how uncomfortable and unswerving they were in their own time. No-one disliked hypocrisy as much as Patrick Kavanagh. No one took so much pleasure in exposing a platitude about the life of this country. No poet asked harder questions and was less satisfied by smooth answers. If his beautiful, demanding lyrics live with us today it is because their honesty is equal to their beauty.
And that honesty, in turn, has made us trust the most exciting part of Patrick Kavanagh's achievement: which is the visionary claim he made for the smallest details around him. This poet, who was so wounded by the distance between town and country, heals that division in his work and makes a single vision out of them both - whether it's the bicycles on this road, or the black hills, or the swan that sails under a bridge in Dublin, or the functional ward of a chest hospital. And if this centre is to be a resource I hope it will always be remembered that its chief resource is the unyielding and unforgettable spirit of the man himself. It seems to me ironic and wonderful that one of the least comfortable, most awkward of Irish writers should have also have become one of the most beloved.