Funeral mass for Paul Durcan taking place in Dublin
The funeral mass is taking place in Dublin of one of Ireland's most renowned contemporary poets Paul Durcan, who died last week aged 80.
A winner of the Whitbread Poetry Prize and the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, his publications include A Snail in My Prime, Crazy About Women, Greetings to our Friends in Brazil, and Cries of an Irish Caveman.
President Michael D Higgins and his wife, Sabina, are among those who are attending requiem mass, which is being being celebrated at St Patrick's Church, Ringsend.
Mr Durcan was a gifted communicator, who was celebrated for his role as a much-loved public voice, breaking barriers with his singular writing and reading style.
He developed a prominent career over the decades, publishing over 20 books.
Mr Durcan will be missed by Nessa, his daughters Sarah and Síabhra, his son Michael, his sons-in-law, daughter-in-law, and his nine grandchildren.
Funeral prayers will be held at St Mary's Church in Westport, Co Mayo tomorrow at 11am, followed by burial in Aughavale Cemetery.
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Irish Independent
25-05-2025
- Irish Independent
Obituary: Paul Durcan, popular, prolific, performing poet who had the power to move people with his words
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.' ADVERTISEMENT Learn more 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.
Irish Times
23-05-2025
- Irish Times
Bridge of Sighs (and Laughter)
Walking to Ringsend for Paul Durcan's funeral on Thursday, I noticed a crowd of locals gathered on the city side of the humpbacked bridge that crosses the Dodder just before the village. They were waiting for the cortege, a man told me, to continue an old tradition whereby – even if they don't know the deceased - Ringsenders help the bereaved family carry the remains over the river to the church. As I took up a position on the far side to get a picture, a woman emerged from somewhere in funeral finery (and a bright red hat). 'Are they going to carry Paul over the bridge?' she asked. They are, I told her, pointing to where the hearse that had just arrived. 'Oh gosh,' he said, hurrying off to join in. READ MORE Sure enough, from there to St Patrick's Church, the cortege became a local production, as the undertakers stood aside temporarily, and the villagers took over as pall bearers and funeral directors. Not all those involved were dressed for the occasion. One leading participant had a baseball hat and shorts. But, the informality of the attire somehow only added to the poignancy. The idea of crossing rivers to eternity is a staple of mythology. In James Joyce's Ulysses, where Paddy Dignam made the journey in the opposite direction to Durcan, the four rivers of Hades become the Dodder, the Grand Canal, the Liffey, and the Royal Canal, in that order. But when I asked Father Ivan Tonge of St Patrick's about it afterwards, he thought the Ringsend tradition might have its origins in a more practical consideration. The Dodder is notoriously prone to flooding on its last stretches and must have washed many early bridges away: 'Locals would sometimes have had to help carry coffins across.' The custom may also, however, be tied up with the unusual traditions of dockers, a profession to which Ringsend has long been central. It used to be the case – and maybe it still happens sometimes – that a docker's coffin was carried by a circuitous route involving the homes of all his friends, at each of which the door knocker would be lifted and dropped one last time, to say goodbye. More mysteriously (according to a 1953 report in The Irish Press), dockers' coffins were also carried 'between the two gasometers': industrial landmarks of the area. Whatever the bridge-carrying ceremony's origins, like many old habits, it might have ended in 2020 with the pandemic. Instead, that only increased the determination of Ringsenders like David 'Smasher' Kemple to keep it alive. 'The Covid ruined a lot of things, and we didn't want it to ruin everything .' he said in a short recent film for the Irish Hospice Foundation. He soon found himself performing the rite for an old friend, whose death first alerted him to the threat of Covid: 'He was a fit man going down to Galway that Friday,' recalled Kemple, sadly. 'Then a couple of weeks later, we were carrying Larry over the bridge.' Mind you, Ringsenders tend to have a robust sense of humour, and 'Smasher' is no exception. He also jokes in the film that he'd like to hold his own wake before he dies, 'to see what it's like'. In which vein, it struck me on Thursday that it was a pity Durcan – one of the funnier poets Ireland has ever produced - wasn't alive to enjoy his own funeral. Among the poems read during the service was one inspired by the election of the pope in 2013, in which he compares Ringsend to the back streets of Buenos Aires and describes many of the landmarks of the funeral route as if they were stations of the cross: 'The Barber Shop, Tesco Express, HQ Dry Cleaners, the three public houses – The Yacht, The Oarsman, Sally's Return – The Bridge Café, the pharmacy, Ladbrokes bookmakers.' He would surely have got another poem from his last trip into the village. The pallbearers do special requests on occasion. In an interview with the Dublin Inquirer newspaper in 2020, another regular participant Eoin Dunne recalled the funeral of a man who had spent his life working as a match-day steward in nearby Lansdowne Road, a stadium visible from the bridge. On his final journey, as demanded, the coffin carriers did an about turn and bowed the departed in gratitude to the scene of so many pay days. But comedy always vies with solemnity in the Ringsend tradition. Dunne also told the Inquirer about an occasion when the deceased was (a) a former scrap metal dealer and (b) very heavy. As the carriers struggled under the coffin, Dunne recalled: 'One of the lads was saying, 'I think he has all the bleeding copper in it'.' Then there was the time they overdid their enthusiasm for the tradition, stopping a hearse with three limousines behind it at the bottom of the bridge. They immediately launched into the routine of organising each other to carry the coffin into Ringsend, until the driver of the hearse intervened. 'Lads, lads stop,' he said (allegedly): 'This funeral is going to f**king Bray.'
Irish Times
22-05-2025
- Irish Times
Paul Durcan remembered as ‘Ireland's poet' at funeral service in Ringsend
Continuing a decades-old funeral tradition in Ringsend, the remains of poet Paul Durcan were carried across the river Dodder by locals and family members on the way to his requiem Mass at St Patrick's church on Thursday. The motor cortege paused before the humpbacked bridge, where residents of the village greeted the Durcan family and then helped carry the coffin the rest of the journey, in tribute to a man who had lived among them for the past 30 years. President Michael D Higgins was among the mourners who filled the church for the funeral, the music at which included a recording of Durcan's typically spirited poetry reading on his 1990 duet with Van Morrison: In the Days Before Rock 'n' Roll. Chief funeral celebrant Father Ivan Tonge cited the 12th century Book of Leinster, recently restored and now the subject of an exhibition in Trinity College Dublin, as evidence of the respect Ireland has always had for its poets, even 'at the highest levels of society'. READ MORE Durcan's funeral continued that ancient tradition, Fr Tonge said. He was Ireland's poet, but he was also Ringsend's and a regular visitor to the church, as witnessed in the community's moving tribute earlier. Actor Mark O'Regan read Durcan's poem The Days of Surprise, which is set in St Patrick's on the day after the election of Pope Francis in 2013, and features a lovingly detailed description of the village, including the bridge: The library with its Chinese granite benches, The health centre, the Master Butcher's, Ferrari's Takeaway, Spar, The charity shop, the wine shop, the humpbacked bridge, Under which, behind Ringsend Church, the River Dodder flows, Like a little mare over the last fence At Cheltenham or Punchestown Before it breasts the line at the winning post, Its rider bent over double Like the angel at the Annunciation, And meets the River Liffey and the sea Durcan's daughter, Sarah, delivered a eulogy in which she said that managing to make a living out of poetry was probably her father's greatest achievement. But she recalled that he also had a great love of sport and liked to believe, had it not been for an early injury, he could have been a star football player. The poet's remains are brought to St Patrick's Church, Ringsend, Dublin. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw He had also been pleasantly surprised by the number of grandchildren he eventually acquired and 'struggled valiantly to keep up with them'. Durcan especially enjoyed it when his poetry connected with young people, she said. She recalled his special delight in the story of a Cork student some years ago who, of the prescribed poets on the curriculum, had studied only her father and promised that if the gamble paid off, he would get the name Paul Durcan 'tattooed on his backside'. Sure enough, Durcan did come up that year and, as widely shared on social media, the student got the tattoo. As part of a reflection on her father's life, Siabhra Durcan read an extract from Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. A close friend of the poet, Caitríona Crowe, read A Psalm of David. Michael John O'Neill read from St Paul's Letter to the Corinthians. Soloist Kathy Kelly sang Ag Críost an Síol. Violinist David O'Doherty played the traditional air, The Coolin/An Chúilfhionn. President Michael D Higgins attended the funeral service for Paul Durcan in Ringsend. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw Writers at the funeral included Rita Ann Higgins, Dermot Bolger, Mary Leland, Belinda McKeon, and Gerard Smith. The Patrick Kavanagh Centre in Inniskeen, whose annual poetry award helped launch Durcan's career, was represented by Una and Art Agnew. [ Paul Durcan - 11 memorable lines: 'She was a whirlpool, And I very nearly drowned' Opens in new window ] Also in attendance were Arts Council director Maureen Kennelly, former TDs John Gormley and Conor Lenihan, journalists Mick Heaney and Paul Gillespie, broadcaster John Kelly, and the historian Charles Lysaght. The poet's remains were greeted at the church by Ballina uilleann piper Eamonn Walsh, and later carried out to the strains of Bob Dylan's Paths of Victory. Durcan's deep connections with Mayo will be remembered at funeral prayers in St Mary's Church, Westport, on Friday, after which he will be buried at the nearby Aughavale Cemetery.
