President Michael D Higgins revealed Ireland’s most loved poem this week and it’s one that will bring you back to your Leaving Certificate days. Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney’s popular poem When All The Others Were Away At Mass was chosen as the best-loved poem of the last 100 years. The poem is taken from his 1987 sequence Clearances which he published after his mother’s death. A shortlist of ten poems was compiled by an independent jury and then put to the public to vote. The jury included singer Damien Dempsey, broadcaster John Kelly, newsreader Anne Doyle and Catriona Crowe from the National Archives of Ireland.

Uachtaráin na hÉireann announces your Poem For Ireland: When all the others were away at Mass by Seamus Heaney. pic.twitter.com/YOGZvAD0Pe — RTÉ Poem for Ireland (@RTEPoetry) March 11, 2015

  When All The Others Were Away at Mass (In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911 – 1984)   When all the others were away at Mass I was all hers as we peeled potatoes. They broke the silence, let fall one by one Like solder weeping off the soldering iron: Cold comforts set between us, things to share Gleaming in a bucket of clean water. And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes From eachother’s work would bring us to our sense. So while the parish priest at her bedside Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying And some were responding and some crying I remembered her head bent towards my head, Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives – Never closer the whole rest of our lives.