Seamus Deane

"Meningitis. It was a word you had to bite on to say it. It had a fright and a hiss in it."

"I know that what your city has done in the war that is past, it shall do again in the war that has already arrived and has still to be won in the future. It is an onerous responsibility. Yet it is a matter of personal pride and happiness that this responsibility is to be borne by the people of the city I first came to know during the war at the Combined Naval and Air Headquarters at Magee College and that I have visited regularly ever since. It is here, where fashion and fads are treated with amusement and contempt, here, in a society that is rooted in tradition and continuity, that one can have a sense of the links between the human struggle and the eternal verities. Without that abiding sense of continuity, men would become little better than the flies of a summer. With that as a treasured element of our patrimony, we become actors in a great drama, a story that ends in a world beyond our own and for which our own is an immense and glorious preparation. God is the goal of our history; our history is the preserve of the God-fearing, the brave, the chivalric, the courteous, the humble."