Seamus Heaney Poster

"I was a second-year student of Irish and English in UCD when Seamus Heaney gave a reading a couple of weeks before Christmas. While he was by now a major figure, I remember it being significant that the reading was in a medium-sized lecture theatre, not one of the small ones, nor in Theatre L, which holds 500 people. Nonetheless the room was full, there must have been about 300 people present. There was flash photography, so there may have been press photographers there, and some people had brought their own cameras in any case. He patiently signed books afterwards, and my poster, many copies of which were cellotaped up (hence the tears) on the concourse outside. Somebody took a picture while he was signing the poster. I think others were also taken as souvenirs so they may be out there in people's houses. Nowhere on it does 'UCD' appear -- maybe it was seen more as a local event, or maybe an oversight?. Whenever I saw his signature anywhere over the years, I always noticed how similar it seemed to stay. I must have discussed my plan to attend the reading with my schoolfriend Marcus Fleming, now the scriptwriter of An Klondike, The Clinic, The Running Mate, etc., who was then an animator with Sullivan Bluth (Ninja Turtles), because he gave me a pamphlet of 'From the Republic of Conscience', Heaney's poem commissioned by Amnesty International, to have signed. I kept the poster in a cardboard tube in the attic for years and mislaid the signed pamphlet, then found it years later, put it somewhere 'safe' to return it, then lost it again. "