The Seamus Heaney Collection
The O’Connell Room on the ground floor has been restored to a high standard that houses the outstanding Seamus Heaney Collection, complete with first editions, translations, letters, and manuscripts from one of Ireland's most renowned poets. Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.”
Heaney had a special relationship with the University of Notre Dame. He visited the University in 1994 and 2003 to deliver public readings, and taught on the IRISH Seminar, a summer programme for graduate students in Irish Studies hosted at Notre Dame Dublin. In 2008, University President Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., awarded Heaney an honorary degree at Notre Dame Dublin's O'Connell House.
He was a lifelong friend of Seamus Deane, the inaugural Donald and Marilyn Keough Chair of Irish Studies at Notre Dame. Alongside Deane, Heaney was a board member of Field Day, a theatre company that grew into a broader cultural and political project, founded by playwright Brian Friel and actor Stephen Rea. In 2005, Notre Dame became the home of Field Day Publications, a collaboration that bore landmark publications in Irish and postcolonial literary criticism, history, politics, and cultural studies.
The Friel Library
The University of Notre Dame Dublin launched and dedicated the Brian Friel Library at O'Connell House in 2023.
Anne Friel, the playwright's wife, generously donated his entire personal library to Notre Dame a few years after he died in 2015.
"Brian Friel was the most globally significant Irish dramatist of his generation," remarked Kevin Whelan, former director of Notre Dame Dublin. "We thank Anne Friel for her extraordinary generosity in gifting the library of her husband to O'Connell House. It is a mark of the respect in which the University of Notre Dame is held in Ireland over the last 25 years."
Email dublin@nd.edu for research enquiries.
The Nanovic Library
Located at the top of O'Connell House, the Nanovic Library houses an extensive collection of resources in Irish history, literature, and culture for student research during their semester studying in Dublin.