Culture
24 Jul 26

Seamus Heaney mural unveiled in Derry

Seamus Heaney mural, credit: Féile Derry and Peaball

The mural comes as the culmination of a year-long PEACEPLUS street art programme that involved the Bishop Street Youth Club and Newbuildings Youth Club.

A new mural celebrating Irish poet Seamus Heaney has been unveiled on Westland Street in Derry.

The artwork depicts the Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney alongside the word “influencer,” with a poem written by 12-year-old Jude Shiels, titled ‘Beneath Irish Skies.' It was created by local street art collective Peaball in partnership with Derry community arts organisation, Féile.

The mural comes as the culmination of a year-long PEACEPLUS street art programme that involved the Bishop Street Youth Club and Newbuildings Youth Club who worked together through a series of workshops to learn the history of street art in Ireland, write poems of their own and design the mural.

“Féile is absolutely delighted to unveil this new mural celebrating Seamus Heaney, a son of Derry who was educated less than a mile from where the mural now stands,” said Project Coordinator Ruairi O’Connell according to the Derry Journal. “It is also fitting that the mural stands at Lone Moor Road, which is referenced in Heaney’s poem ‘The Road to Derry.’”

Heaney, born 1939 and died 2013, first came to public attention in the mid 1960s when he was active in a group of poets now recognised as highly influential to Irish writing. He worked as a university lecturer, translator, playwright and poet, eventually winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 for “works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth.”