Heaney says Brown's murder "shocking"

NOBEL literature prizewinner Seamus Heaney has written of his distress at the murder of fellow Bellaghy man, Mr Sean Brown. Dr Heaney said the sectarian murder of the GAA administrator was "shocking and sinister" and his heart went out to the Brown family, whom he had known for two generations.

Dr Heaney said he learnt of the murder in Greece, after visiting the stadium where the original Olympic Games were held. "Given Sean Brown's role as chairman of the Gaelic Athletic Club in Bellaghy I could not help thinking of his death as a crime against the ancient Olympic spirit," he wrote in a letter to the Irish News.

"The Greeks recognised that there was something sacrosanct about the athletic ideal and regarded any violence during the period of the games as sacrilegious. Athletics and drama, two of the great civilising activities of Greece, were two of the activities which Sean Brown promoted."

Dr Heaney added: "He was a man of integrity and goodwill, qualities which were manifest when he presided at an event organised by the club in January last year to celebrate the award of the Nobel Prize to this particular Bellaghy man.

"Many things were precious about that evening," he wrote, "including Sean's presentation to me of a painting of Lough Beg." But most important was the fact that it, "was attended by people from both sides of the Bellaghy community, Protestant and Catholic.

"He represented something better than we have grown used to, something not quite covered by the word reconciliation, because that word has become a policy word - official and public. This was more like a purification, a release from what the Greeks called the `miasma', the stain of spilled blood.

"It is a terrible irony that the man who organised such an event should die at the hands of a sectarian killer."

Mr Brown will be buried in Bellaghy today after 11 a.m. Mass at St Mary's Church.