The Observer on Heaney and Lisbon

"Seamus Heaney launches fierce attack on Irish opponents of Lisbon Treaty", reported the Observer Sunday.  Seamus Heaney was interviewed by the Observer, and said that:

" "The reasons for voting 'no' are manufactured, on the whole. And if it's 'no' again, I think we have lost ourselves in the modern world."

Europe was "more than a bureaucracy, it's an ideal," he said. "The word 'Europe' is one of the first cultural underpinnings to our lives in this part of the globe. It's for Greece, Italy, Rome, England, France that I feel it." He also dismissed claims that the Lisbon Treaty would end Irish sovereignty and see the republic absorbed into a European super-state. "