Obituary: Paul Durcan, popular, prolific, performing poet who had the power to move people with his words

Irish Independent

25-05-2025

Prolific, popular and a performing poet, he had the power to move people with his words. A sensitive soul who took the daring leap to devote his life to ­poetry, he was a rare breed.
He also had a great gift for making people laugh. One of his poems began with the line: 'My father was a man with five penises.'
His poetry chronicled Irish life and his own life. The two were intertwined. His great friend Niall ­MacMonagle described his work as 'the soundtrack to our lives'.
Indeed it was.
Durcan's finger was relentlessly on the pulse of the nation. He would ­peruse the newspapers and broadcast media, then spin them into poetic gold. Such was the power of his writing that his verses often had more ­potency than any news report.
'That's one of the things about people who write poetry, you record things that you would have forgotten about, that I would have forgotten about,' he once said.
He wrote about the poor Loreto nuns who burned to death in a tragic accident (Six Nuns Die in ­Convent ­Inferno).
When a man drowned ­trying to cross the River Slane at a Bob Dylan concert, he commemorated it in verse.
He wrote about the divorce referendum and his rage as a priest from the pulpit urged a vote against it, in accordance with the church's teachings.
When the IRA killed two RUC policemen, his poem The Bloomsday Murders, 16th June 1997 was placed on the front page of The Sunday ­Independent.
'Not even you, Gerry Adams, deserve to be murdered, You whose friends at noon murdered my two young men, David Johnston and John Graham.'
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He also had a great ability to look at the world from an oblique angle. His poems would go off on surreal tangents, like the one about the old ladies who escaped from a nursing home, giggling in their golden dressing gowns. Another one imagined his elderly mother installing a trapeze in her kitchen. He was a master at making people laugh.
He captured the minutiae of Irish life. He wrote of a priest in the middle of a 'fast mass', asking his congregation to pray that Clare would beat Galway in the All-Ireland hurling quarter-final.
When he wasn't writing, he spent a lot of time doing poetry readings. ­Although he has a poem about one lone man being his audience, this was not the norm. They were almost always booked out, and with good reason.
To say that he recited his poetry would be an understatement. He performed. His readings were mesmeric.
He would close his eyes, wait for ­silence and then freefall into an odyssey of his beautifully bizarre world.
Complete with accents, facial expressions and fantastic timing, he would have the audience in howls of laughter. He would bask in this joy with his gentle smile. Other times when his criticism of IRA atrocities, in verse, was met with stony silence, he would carry on courageously.
Having heard him, it was impossible to read his poems without his voice in your head. But equally, they were strong enough to stand alone.
Paul Durcan was born in Dublin in 1944 to Sheila MacBride and John Durcan. His mother's family name was a huge part of his childhood because her father's younger brother was John MacBride who was executed in 1916. Her first cousin was Seán MacBride, the son of John MacBride and Maud Gonne.
His father was a Mayo man. John Durcan was a secondary school teacher who went on to become a barrister and later a judge.
He wrote about them both in his poetry. He had precious childhood memories of getting the 11 bus with his mother with her pearl earrings, matching necklace and glistening lipstick, on the way to see Treasure Island in the cinema. He said that she was his first childhood sweetheart.
His relationship with his father was often troubled. It is all in the poetry, especially in the book Daddy, Daddy.
Paul wrote of asking if they could pass out the moon as they drove in his father's Ford Anglia to Mayo. His father would quiz him on whether his bowels had moved or not and tell him that he would leave him his galoshes.
As a young boy, when he didn't ­excel academically in the top three in the class, his father beat him. Years later, a doctor persuaded Mr Durcan his son should be institutionalised.
When he was 19, Paul was put into a psychiatric hospital where he had to undergo 27 sessions of Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) treatment.
Alan Gilsenan covered this period in his documentary about Paul's life The Dark School. But ever after, he was reluctant to talk about that time. It was the distant past.
'I ended up in St John of Gods in a ridiculous way. There was nothing the matter with me. I'm sure you saw the film One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Well, I was one of the luckier ones, one of the ones who flew over the cuckoo's nest and survived it,' he said.
'I didn't get a leucotomy which would have finished me off completely but I did get massive amounts of barbiturates, the whole Mandrax and every lethal tablet you could ever name. I think I came out of it with a kind of melancholia.'
As the years passed, he became softer about his father.
'I wrote what I wrote,' he said of his poems about him, 'but I realise that some people have formed too black an impression of him. He took his job as a judge unbelievably seriously and it definitely made him more melancholic. It took its toll on him.
"But he was a terrific storyteller and he was forever telling me about the French Revolution. It fascinated him and so Robespierre and Danton were real to me.'
He got a degree in archaeology and medieval history. Paul married Nessa O'Neill in 1968. She changed his life. They lived in London for some time and had two daughters Sarah and Síabhra. They finally settled in Cork.
He wrote of the wondrous joy of their love and family life. When their marriage broke down in 1984, he wrote about it in verse. The heartache was heartbreaking to read. The Difficulty that is Marriage is one of his poems on the Leaving Cert syllabus.
He poured his life into his work. ­Poetry was his life and his life was in his poetry. In one poem he wrote: 'Do not buy the biography of Primo Levi. If you want to know Primo Levi, read the poetry of Primo Levi. The poetry is the story; The story is the life.'
And so it was with him. It is all there. He wrote of love, loneliness, how he was crazy about women and how his hair was grey with woman hunger. He wrote about two recovering alcoholics spending Christmas Day together.
He wrote about how he was not a natural driver and had spent endless Sunday afternoons driving around, practising so he would pass his test.
He wrote of how appalled he was that his bedroom had a matching squalor to the artist Tracey Emin's grubby exhibit, with his sheets the colour of stagnant dishwater.
Last October, the Gate Theatre hosted a night to celebrate the publication of Paul Durcan — 80 at 80. It was his final book, a compilation of his poetry edited by Niall MacMonagle. His poems were recited by many including President Michael D Higgins.
But Paul was not there. He was no longer able. His life had changed and he was in a nursing home.