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Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Yahoo
Paul Durcan, Irish poet who examined the Troubles and gave intense public readings
Paul Durcan, who has died aged 80, was a prolific and popular poet whose work was often marked by a reaction against authority and intolerance, which he found both in his relationship with his father and in his native Ireland. Although his poetry reveals a profound love of both, he could be unsparing of his targets, which he could attack with scathing satire as well as affection. A poem from Daddy, Daddy (1990), a collection that won the Whitbread Poetry Award, has both at once, as Durcan recalls 'the battle' to persuade his father to buy him a copy of Joyce's Ulysses when he was a teenager. John Durcan, the senior circuit court judge of County Mayo, declared (in the poem 'Ulysses', at least): 'I'll not be party to subsidising that blackguard / Bringing works of blasphemy into this house.' Other poems respond in a direct, personal way to acts of terror and to the intransigence of the church. Durcan found himself enthralled by a sermon in 1986, but recoiled when it ended with a plea to vote against divorce in the forthcoming referendum. His own marriage had recently broken down, which led him to reflect: 'I have come into this temple today to pray / And be healed by, and joined with, the Spirit of Life, / Not to be invaded by ideology.' Of self-styled liberators, he was directly damning. One poem, 'In Memory of Those Murdered in the Dublin Massacre, May 1974,' endsy evoking 'An explosion of petals, of aeons, and the waitresses too, flying breasts and limbs, / For a free Ireland.' He commemorated the victims of the 1998 Omagh bombing by reciting their names, then their ages, then their home towns, and concluding with a line addressed to the killers, 'I cannot forgive you.' He would broadcast these words later, aiming them straight at Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein. But it was his confessional tone as much as his declamatory commentary on the Troubles that made him public property. He could use the rhythms of poems to pace his pieces as if they were short stories, some of which are outlandish fantasies, but others intimate, real and vivid. His work appeared in rapid bursts – rather than emotion recollected in tranquillity, they can seem like notes on unfolding situations – and what his collections may at times lack in editing and polish, they gain in immediacy. In this he owed perhaps as much to Allen Ginsberg's hectoring use of repetition as he did to the refrains of Irish poems and melodies. It made his readings, during which he could appear to be meditating or delving into memory, especially intense. Paul Durcan was born in Dublin on October 16 1944, the son of Justice John Durcan and his wife Sheila. Through his mother he was descended both from Maud Gonne, the muse of WB Yeats, and from John MacBride, who was executed for his part in the Easter Rising of 1916. Although Durcan would remember his father as an engaging raconteur, he would also recall being beaten from the age of 10 if he came lower than third in exams. He began to study Law and Economics at University College, Dublin, but this effort to please his father was outweighed by Durcan's growing interest in poetry. The rift between them reached a crisis point when Durcan was 19 and a doctor persuaded his father that he should be institutionalised. The family achieved this by ambushing Durcan in a pub on Merrion Street: two relatives entered, and a third caught him as he tried to escape by the back door. Taken home, he was given the first of many injections, and then sent to Harley Street. For the next three years, he was in and out of mental hospitals. He endured 27 rounds of electroconvulsive therapy, and later considered himself lucky to have been spared a lobotomy. In 1966, he settled in London, where he worked for the Gas Board. He met his future wife, Nessa O'Neill, at the wedding of the poet Patrick Kavanagh; the two poets had become friends after Kavanagh wrote an enthusiastic review of Durcan's first published work, Endsville (1967, co-written with Brian Lynch). Durcan remembered finding in Kavanagh a merry wit on which few others had commented. Durcan and Nessa O'Neill married in 1968. They settled in Cork in 1970, with their two daughters; Durcan resumed his studies, and gained a first-class degree in Archaeology and Medieval History. Nessa became a teacher in a prison in Cork, and Paul contributed a column to the Cork Examiner. The marriage broke down in 1984. He was soon in demand internationally as a performer; trips to Russia and Brazil were particularly fruitful, not least because he could assess Ireland's relative place in the world. In the shadow of a statue of Stalin, he comments, 'We Irish have had our bellyful of blat / And blarney, more than our share / Of the nomenklatura of Church and Party…' His outrage at authoritarian figures led him to praise strong women, and not only his mother, wife and daughters. He was an enthusiastic supporter of Mary Robinson's campaign to become President of Ireland, and wrote poems praising her. Unlike the poets of the North, who would often find slanted ways to convey truths about the Troubles, Durcan addressed them with an open-eyed horror. Even when the island was at peace, though, he found aspects of it to ridicule. Poems from the early years of this century skewer the chattering classes, or the financiers who were responsible for the yo-yoing of the country's economy. Later collections mock Dubliners who find it easier to jet to Nice rather than drive to the south coast, or imagine a WB Yeats shopping centre. He would explain in interviews that his traumatic experiences with doctors earlier in life left him with melancholia and depression, and much of his poetry can be seen as an expression of this. But time tempered it: he came to express an awareness of how horrible his ideas could be. His responses to the world remained intimately bound up with his own private world: just as his relationship with his father was rooted in an Ireland in which Durcan found oppression and hypocrisy, he could see how his relationship with his mother, in her last years of dementia, could suggest parallels with an increasingly strange and frightening background. In one poem, he sits with her as they watch news of the planes attacking the World Trade Centre: the poem reproduces the psalms and nursery rhymes that feel like a response that is at once natural and unnatural. For a while, he found paintings a useful stimulus: he produced a volume of poems through which he imagined his way into the paintings of the National Gallery in London, Give Me Your Hand. Previously, he had curated an exhibition of paintings in Dublin, but still found opportunities to mock his commissioners: he has a guard muse about those around him, 'They scamper off for their coleslaw. / Punters scoff a lot of coleslaw in the National Gallery of Ireland.' He is survived by two daughters and a son. Paul Durcan, born October 16 1944, died May 17 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Irish Times
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Brace yourself as the world's leaders make a holy show of themselves at the Pope's funeral
Who is that person the mighty are coming to bury in Rome tomorrow? Is it for the man who preached against burning fossil fuels that the great and the good are flying in their intercontinental jets to pay their last respects? Are the would-be colonisers and land-grabbers gathering to praise the peace-lover who Zoom-called Catholics under siege in Gaza at 7pm every night ? What part of a man who chose to live more humbly than his predecessors will be reflected in the pomp and circumstance of his funeral? WH Auden wrote in the poem he entitled In Memory of WB Yeats that 'the words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living'. Pope Francis tried to guard against such modification by requesting that he be laid to rest in just one coffin instead of the traditional three papal coffins made of elm, cypress and lead, and that he be buried with dignity 'like any Christian'. But he could not prevent his death from turning into a spectacle of the sort of privilege and hypocrisy he deprecated. Nor could he stop his spirit being banished before he is even buried. Journalists have swooped en masse upon the Eternal City to record every swing of a thurible, every state ruler's facial expression at tomorrow's funeral. They will not be disappointed for there will be VIPs galore willing, in the immortal words of Verona Murphy, to 'make a holy show' of themselves, literally. Topping the list of elites will be the twice-divorced and thrice-married sexual assailant Donald Trump , who wants to conquer Greenland, Gaza and Canada; is ordering mass deportations from the US; and is attempting to crush universities, the judiciary and truth in the news. Rather than suggesting he stay away, the Holy See's gatekeepers will accord him and his entourage a red-carpet welcome. The last time this hawker of his own-branded bible famously sat in a church, he demanded an apology from the Episcopalian bishop Mariann Budde for pleading from the pulpit that mercy be shown to immigrants, gays, lesbians and transgender people. Trump need not brace himself for any mouthy woman bishop tomorrow. READ MORE Whole battalions of dignitaries from countries with booming weapons industries will assemble in St Peter's Square, watched over by the Swiss Guards and the gendarmerie of Vatican City. Fighter jets will patrol the sky. Anti-drone weapons will be at the ready. Up to 170 foreign delegations are expected. Ireland, alone, is to be represented by President Michael D Higgins and Sabina along with the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste. How many starving children could be fed for the price of that security bill? What these days in Rome demonstrate is that, no matter who becomes the Pope, the institution will outlive and out-rule him Don't expect any civic leaders who actually practise what Francis preached to be given top-priority seats. Will Trump, Macron, Merz and Starmer shove down the line to make space for Mary Robinson and Greta Thunberg, dogged campaigners to save this planet that the Pope called 'our common home'? Will the Red Crescent or Unrwa or Médecins Sans Frontières, who risk and sometimes give their lives to save others, fill the front rows? And what of the migrants in camps like Lampedusa, the Italian island he chose for the first visit of his papacy 'to reawaken our consciences and recall our responsibilities'? Will the princes of the Church bow to them? The devout among the globe's 1.4 billion Catholics and those cradle Catholics and non-Catholics who have been inspired by Francis's message of humanity are entitled to share in a fitting farewell to him, but the funeral dignity he wished for already looks in jeopardy. There has been no time to declutter the Vatican's ostentatious wealth before the obsequies for a man who derided consumerism as a 'plague' and a 'cancer'. The stallholders will, as usual, make hay flogging their souvenir holy water fonts, keyrings and canvas bags. The tour guides will guide. The hotels will burst at the seams. The restaurant queues will be out the door. The sightseers were unavoidable on Wednesday as they lofted their smartphones to scavenge pictures of the dead pope in his open coffin during the procession to St Peter's Basilica. Why on earth would anybody want such a macabre picture other than as proof of the brag that 'I was there'? [ Pope Francis's death silences a voice for the voiceless Opens in new window ] Since his death on Easter Monday the posthumous eulogies to Francis have incessantly mentioned his commitment to 'equality', but the procession of cardinals that preceded his remains for his removal to the basilica affirmed that the Church's concept of equality does not apply equally. There is no starker reminder to the female of the species of our lesser standing than a pope's funeral. Other than the head-to-toe-clad nuns on the sidelines and a thin sprinkling of women among the dignitaries – EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, to name two – the men-only club will be out in force. Even Francis 'the reformer' could not assail that bastion. The perniciousness of that discrimination and how it propagates unconscious bias beyond the church has been evident in the speculation about which man will succeed him, and the occasional lament that there has never been an Irish pope. Lads, may I point out that there has never been a woman pope, or cardinal, or bishop or priest? Ireland accounts for just 0.06 per cent of the world's 8.2 billion people. Females account for half of them. [ When Pope Francis met abuse survivors in Ireland: 'He drew a picture of a toilet. Anything that goes into that is caca' Opens in new window ] What these days in Rome demonstrate is that, no matter who becomes the Pope, the institution will outlive and out-rule him. Pope Francis began working on his autobiography, Hope, in 2019 with the intention that it would not be published until after his death. He changed his mind and brought its publication forward when he saw how the world's ruling ethics were rapidly going to hell in a handcart. True to its name, the book gives its reader some hope; exactly what is needed in our time of wars, pestilence, climate damage, atrocious poverty and Maga madness. The biggest loss the world has to mourn this weekend is not that of the titular head of an organised religion but that of a voice of decency. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, may you rest in peace.
