Tom Paulin’s speech when receiving the Special Award
Thank you, Kate! Thank you, judges!
I am very moved to be here for the first time in the Seamus Heaney Centre and back in my home city to receive this prestigious award. It is indeed a surprise and a great honour and humbling to be among such a distinguished list of previous winners.
In receiving this award, I want to pay homage to Jane Ewart-Biggs, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at a gathering of the British-Irish Association in Oxfordshire. Her dignified and courageous response to her peace-loving husband’s brutal assassination has provided an example of turning despair into hope, violence and sectarianism into steps towards peace and reconciliation. Indeed, all the Ewart-Biggs family have shown the same resilience and have been dedicated to campaigning for human rights, justice and peace.
We can celebrate ‘the shifting ground’ and the developing understanding between the Protestant and Catholic communities. The new Ireland can hopefully build on the Ewart-Biggs legacy and also move more towards an internationalist and global perspective, welcoming ‘strangers to our shore’ and enabling asylum seekers to settle and contribute as citizens, particularly now in the increasing number of war-torn regions.
I am pleased to say that as someone who has tried to bear witness to the Troubles in my work, in this poem “Nothing to Be Said” (written some time ago) I imagine a new peaceful Ireland.
Nothing to Be Said
a back road near Pettigo
where the border runs through the main street
but where it is now
is anyone’s guess.
In the new Ireland,
there are no customs posts,
no sangars, soldiers, police
or barbed wire.
Looking out, I felt much less of a person than I did before
but knowing this new island
was better, far better,
than all that went before it.
There was simply nothing to be said
about the view of the mountains
and wild rhododendrons
strayed from some estate
or the sight of Ben Bulben,
massive and tabled,
across Sligo Bay.
Which made me think of epitaphs
that could neither get written
nor chiselled in hard stone.
The question is – and I am so happy to say this – do I still have a subject? Thank you!!