Priest pays tribute to friend and poet Heaney

Canon Eugene Dolan

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A LEES priest has paid tribute to his friend and Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney who has died aged 74.

Canon Eugene Dolan from St Edwards’s Church went to school with Heaney — regarded as the greatest Irish poet since William Butler Yeats — and the pair remained good friends.

Last year Heaney sent Father Dolan one of his books inscribed with a special message to mark his 50th anniversary of joining the priesthood.

Father Dolan said: “We started at the same school on the same day — St Columb’s College in Derry.

“We were both boarders, country boys from different parts of the country. In those days if you passed the 11 plus there was only one option; you went as a boarder because there were no secondary schools in Ireland.

“He was the same then as the morning when he died: a big, honest, straight-forward, good humoured fellow — he never changed.”
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