'The Lough will claim a victim every year'.
To mark World Day for Safety and Health at Work and Workers' Memorial Day, 28th April 2024, which this year is focussing on the impacts of climate change on occupational safety and health, we offer a podcast of A Lough Neagh Sequence by Seamus Heaney.
One of the by products of climate change is the accelerating global biodiversity crisis. And nowhere is this more evident than in the largest freshwater lake in these islands - bordering five of the six counties of Northern Ireland - Lough Neagh. Supplying more than 40% of the North’s drinking water and hosting the largest wild eel fishery in Europe, Lough Neagh is a cultural and archaeological "jewel" that reaches way back into the very beginning of the shared memory of this island.
Taken from Seamus Heaney’s 1969 sophomore collection Door Into The Dark, the seven short sequential poems comprising A Lough Neagh Sequence is ‘dedicated to the fishermen’, whose numbers have since dwindled from hundreds to a handful. Eel numbers are also collapsing. A thick sludge of surface algae is displacing the sanctuary of "silt and sand" the eels seek and hide in. These miraculous sea creatures who migrate from their breeding grounds in the Sargasso Sea (a body of water northeast of the Carribean in the Atlantic Ocean) are carried by The Gulf Stream across the world to Lough Neagh. The poem sequence both celebrates the ecological co - dependency of human beings, the animal kingdom and the Land, while serving as an unintended reminder of what once was, and could be lost ... forever - ‘The Lough will claim a victim every year’.
1. A Lough Neagh Sequence 1. Up the Shore
2. A Lough Neagh Sequence 2. Beyond Sargasso
3. A Lough Neagh Sequence 3. Bait
4. A Lough Neagh Sequence 4. Setting
5. A Lough Neagh Sequence 5. Lifting
6. A Lough Neagh Sequence 6. The Return
7. A Lough Neagh Sequence 7. Vision
Buíochas ó chroí do Mhuintir Heaney.
Seamus Heaney's poetry is published by Faber. For more information go to