Press Releases
Archbishop John McDowell pays tribute to Michael Longley

Archbishop John McDowell, the Church of Ireland’s Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, has issued the following tribute to the late Michael Longley:
“I would like to add these few words to the many which have been written in tribute, from many quarters, to the late poet, naturalist and seer Michael Longley.
Among Michael’s many official and unofficial duties, he kindly served as a Patron of the Robinson Library in Armagh. Indeed what seems like only a few months ago, not long after he was named as the winner of the Feltrinelli International Poetry Prize, he gave a reading in Library to help raise funds for that unique eighteenth–century institution. Michael did many such works of kindness and always carried them out cheerfully – in the words of Alexander Pope he ‘did good by stealth/and blushed to find it fame’.
In the 2024 BBC documentary about his life and work entitled Where do the poems come from? Michael spoke about a letter he had received from the late Rosetta Larmour, the mother of a man who ran an ice–cream shop on the Lisburn Road and who had been murdered by the Provisional IRA. Rosetta was writing to thank Michael for the poem he had written about her son in which he named twenty–one flavours of ice–cream for sale in the shop and also the names of twenty–one wild flowers he had been able to identify on a recent visit to the Burren in County Clare.
In the documentary, Michael said that the words in that letter ‘…excited feelings in me that are limitless and will go on reverberating in my soul ‘til the day I die’. These words reflect a prodigious and deep humanity and truthfulness. They also reflect what many of us feel about so many of the words which Michael himself wrote over his long vocation as a poet. He left the impression that he sincerely meant all the words which he wrote or spoke, in poetry or in prose, in public and in private, in life and in death; and that he believed them all.”
Ar dheis Dé go Raibh a Anam.