Heaney became part of a group in Belfast who, he recalled, “used to talk poetry day after day with an intensity and prejudice that cannot but have left a mark on all of us”.In 1966 he published his first major collection of poetry, which arrived on the literary landscape like a thunderclap. He longed to be a full-time poet but elected to lecture there initially because of distrust of his ability.It was in the 1960s that the poet began to emerge. There he learned to avoid Protestant boys attempting to run him over with their bicycles.One of Heaney’s earliest memories is of his father, a cattle dealer, nearly drowning because his horse reared up and overturned his cart on a river-bank. But it was this rural childhood which shaped Heaney’s languorous early poetry, with its sensuous evocations of blackberry picking, milk churning, thatching and threshing.He was educated at St Columb’s College, Londonderry, then at Queen’s College, Belfast, where he was a brilliant scholar. MARIANNE MACDONALD

Arts Reporter
Seamus Heaney has risen to literature’s Olympian heights from the simplest of beginnings – a small farm called Mossbawn in Co Londonderry where he was born the eldest of nine children in 1939.He was brought up a Catholic on the farm sprawled on the long, flat road between Toomebridge in Co Antrim – famous for eels and the hanging of the Catholic republican patriot Roddy MacCorly – and Castle Dawson in Co Londonderry, a Protestant loyalist town. Copies of Mr Blair’s speech drafts passed between his office – and later his suite in Brighton’s Metropole Hotel – to BT in London, and according to one account, to some of the senior BT executives gathered, ironically, along with Ian Taylor, the DTI Telecommunications Minister, at an international telecommunications conference in Geneva By Tuesday the text was agreed and the deed done.. Highly secret negotiations were carried out by Alan Rudge, BT’s deputy chairman and Jonathan Powell, Mr Blair’s chief of staff, who worked closely with Geoff Norris, the industry and education adviser in Mr Blair’s office.After the summer holiday, the negotiations fell into place with remarkable speed.

Immediately, Mr Keating who, even more than Tony Blair, has never made any secret of his admiration for the political drive of Margaret Thatcher, had an imposing dossier of speeches and documents faxed down from Canberra and communicated his enthusiasm to Mr Blair.It was not long after Mr Smith’s conference at the Queen Elizabeth II centre in Westminster that discreet contact was made between Mr Blair’s office and BT, and the basis for the proposal which Mr blair announced on Tuesday was put to Sir Iain. But it may have been Mr Blair’s trip to Australia that finally persuaded of him of the political profile such a policy could be given.For as Mr Blair chatted with the Australian premier in one of their adjoining suites overlooking the hexagonal pool, Mr Blair remarked that he had to return home to make a speech to the information superhighway conference Mr Smith had convened for July 18.By all accounts, Paul Keating, who also has an agenda of connecting up every public building, was lyrical about the political implications of the superhighway. That idea – which was virtually the only aspect of the policy announced on Tuesday which did not crop up in the Select Committee Report – eventually bore fruit in the BT offer to connect every school, college, hospital and library for free.By the time Mr Blair travelled to Hayman Island in July the policy of agreeing to lift the restrictions on BT, Mercury and other potential telephone companies in return for free interconnection of public institutions was already complete. In July, Mr Blair was a keynote speaker at Mr Murdoch’s international conference for his senior staff, held at the luxurious Hayman Island resort, off the coast of Queensland.Chris Smith, who was anything but a computer expert when Mr Blair’s summons came, but is now widely respected in the industry as a very fast learner, travelled to the US, met Vice President Al Gore’s information technology experts, talked to Department of Commerce officials and went to Stamford University and California’s “Smart valley” to bring himself up to date with the information revolution.Mr Smith set up a policy forum not only of front benchers and Labour MPs but a number of outside consultants, ranging from Sir David Puttnam to Logica’s Philip Hughes, Professor Steve Hepple of Anglia Polytechnic’s Ultralab, Sir John Daniel of the Open University and James Purnell, information expert at the left of centre Instititute of Public Policy Research, an Islington Labour councillor and one of Mr Blair’s key advisers on the issue.And by February, when Tony Blair met Sir Iain to hear his pitch on behalf of the Select Committee report, Mr Smith was already floating the idea in speeches that the Government would need some form of social return for relaxing the restrictions. Indeed it was that subject over which Mr Blair’s relationship with Rupert Murdoch, international media tycoon, began to warm.

Heaney is a literary hero sans pareil in a world where heroes are few Hats off gentlemen, indeed.. DONALD MACINTYRE

Political Editor
The remarkable arrival of Lord Tebbit and Sir Iain Vallance, chairman of British Telecom , in Brighton yesterday to defend Tony Blair’s agreement with BT from Tory attack, brought to a fresh and hugely public climax a policy process which, until this week, had attracted little attention but which has been long in the making.It was last October that Tony Blair – who has his own E-mail address, and whose computer-literate wife Cherie is fully Internet-friendly, asked Chris Smith, the shadow Heritage Secretary, to make the development of policy on the information superhighway his central priority for the year.The Commons Trade and Industry Select Committee, chaired by Labour’s Richard Caborn but Tory-dominated, had in the late summer of 1994 already recommended the gradual relaxation of restrictions on BT’s access to the cable entertainment business between 1998 and 2002.The company insists this is necessary to secure an adequate return for the pounds 15bn investment needed to finance the right mix of fibre optic, radio link and modernised networks of copper cable to put the whole of Britain on line.This sort of infrastructure would allow a schoolchild in Falkirk to tap into the Science Museum’s database in London or a doctor to take a instant second opinion from a consultant by showing him an X-ray while his patient is still in his surgery.The Government rejected the recommendation outright-though there were uncorroborated suggestions in Westminster yesterday that Mr Heseltine would have liked to adopt the proposals but was advised by two senior officials in the DTI’s telecommunications division that this was impossible, given the commitments made to the cable companiesBut well before then Mr Blair had been talking to media heavyweights about the implications of the superhighway. He is an exhilarating man to meet, the narrow slits of his eyes (in that vast battlement of a head) constantly creased with laughter, his huge ploughman’s grip dwarfing one’s citified fingers.He will argue enthusiastically with star-struck students about critical theory, extemporise risky literary formulations (speaking of someone’s attempt to represent Wilde as a killer satirist, he once told me: “Synge goes right in under the nail; Wilde just glides along the top of it.”) then escape to hear his friend David Hammond play Sink Her in the Lowland Sea on a battered folk guitar. But in Clearances, a sequence of sonnets to his late mother, and in his most recent collection, Seeing Things, he returned spectacularly to form, through his own past, writing of the “space” that was enrichingly cleared in his life by death, and the intimations of the numinous that wake the everyday world into sudden light, and transform it as his own poetry transformed mud and stones into statement. Though his language never lost its gnarled and knotted music, or its magical precision, his concerns became increasingly rarefied in The Haw Lantern and Station Island, and his imagination seemed to turn inward.

He became a kind of ambassador of poetry on the global lecture circuit. His work began to consider the language that is shared but fought over by English and Irish, the huge symbolic properties contained in a verb or in an oyster – “the frond-lipped, brine-stung glut/of privilege”. It was an act of perfect imaginative sympathy.After North, Heaney’s role as an essentially public writer was established. “Out there in Jutland,” he wrote, “In the old man-killing parishes,/I will feel lost,/Unhappy and at home”. From evoking the sights and smells and threats of rural life – the churning-day crocks, the flax- dam invaded by an army of bolted frogs – he moved on to consider the roots of violence in his native Ulster.His most daring mythopoeic stroke dates from those years, when he drew an explicit connection between Provo and UVF murders, and the ancient tribal rituals of Scandinavia; the medieval sacrificial rites of the Tollund Men.