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Irish Times
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- 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
- Entertainment
- 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.
Irish Times
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Paul Durcan: ‘Poetry was a gift that he loved to give others'
Kathleen MacMahon I knew Paul a little, as a neighbour in Ringsend and a friend of my mother's and my aunt's. When my mother died, in 2010, he came up to me at the removal and thrust a piece of paper at me - a two-page portrait in verse that captured her perfectly, with 'her seaside airs and graces'. I asked him to read it at her funeral the next day, which he very graciously did. Then he stood in the road and blocked the path of the hearse, clutching at his hair with grief. Utterly poetic. The poetry was a gift that he loved to give others. I remember when he was launching The Days of Surprise in 2015, there was an event at the Pavilion in Dún Laoghaire. I went to it with Maeve Binchy's widower Gordon Snell and her cousin, Sara Burke. We were having supper beforehand at a restaurant near the theatre, and Paul was at a table nearby with his publicist. He and Gordon didn't know each other well, but they reminisced about a St Patrick's Day parade they'd attended in Chicago with Maeve. Gordon, ever the gentleman, wrote Paul a note that was delivered to the dressing room before the reading. We took our seats in the theatre and Paul came on stage and read a poem he'd just written for Gordon. I was struck not just by his speed in dashing off a poem, but by the elegance of the offering, like presenting someone with a flower. Even though he told me afterwards in an email that 'readings are fearful things that slice years off my life'. This is the poem: READ MORE for Gordon, and remembering Maeve, and all those days long years ago on the shores of LSD in white stretch limos laughing ourselves into kingdom come love Paul He inhabited the role of poet so completely. The poetry was not just in his work but in his demeanour, his everyday interactions. Bumping into him in the grocery aisle in Tesco in Ringsend, he would launch straight into a conversation that might have been a poem and perhaps soon would be. 'Do you think Bill Clinton is a PHONEY? I think he's a PHONEY.' Even his e-mails were broken into stanzas and capitalised, with an aside to note the words he loved, like Scandinavia. Everything he did and said came out as poetry. He was the real thing! Conor O'Callaghan I first met Paul Durcan in the summer of 1984. He was sharing a room with our father in the Rutland Centre in Templeogue. I knew his work from his appearances on the Mike Murphy show on the radio and was in awe of him. He came and stayed in our house in Dundalk shortly after. I was writing poems by then. Paul read them and was always so kind and supportive. 'Read Louis MacNeice,' he told me, 'and the new Mahon Selected from OUP, and Elizabeth Bishop.' My copies of those poets' books date from the end of that summer. We stayed very close for 20 years. We sat in his cave in Ringsend and talked poetry and art and Bob Dylan. I loved how, for someone as brilliant as he undoubtedly was, he had this childlike relationship to the given world. It was ever a source of absolute wonderment and/or bemusement. When, in 2013, I published a book of poems with a big long mad sequence at the end, I asked Paul's permission to dedicate it to him. Why? he asked. Because I loved him and his work, I said, and I wanted to salute him as a master, the Jacques Prevert of Dartmouth Square. He liked that last bit. His eyes crinkled and he gave that gap-toothed, down-curled smile of his. 'The Jacques Prevert of Dartmouth Square,' he repeated in that slow, deep voice of his. 'Golly!' The popularity of his work should never be allowed to cast a shadow over its quality, which is brilliant and which nobody will get rid of too easily. His inaugural reading as writer-in-residence in Trinity College remains the best poetry reading I was ever at. It was electric, like the storming of the Bastille. After his first poem, The Haulier's Wife Meets Jesus on the Road Near Moone, there was a moment's silence. Then we all just cheered and cheered…. Bernard MacLaverty I was saddened to hear of the death of the writer and poet, Paul Duncan. I had known and admired his work, in prose and verse, for many years. He had a totally individual voice which was instantly recognisable on the page with its feelings of concern, its wit, its humanity and its total honesty. One of the things that made him unforgettable was to hear him read or recite his work live. He would take the stage (even if it was an early morning) and command the audience with his eyes. He would wait for silence. When the room was utterly still he would begin - spellbinding each and every one of us with a mixture of solemnity and wit, humour and disquiet - reeling us in, telling us his truth. His work and his sound, for those of us who heard him, will never be forgotten. William Wall Paul has been a legend now for so long that it's difficult to find anything new to say about him. But I remember him well from his years in Cork, and in fact I remember the first time I heard him read. His reading style was electrifying, his writing was daring, different, shocking at times, but also amusing and engaging. Even though he was second fiddle to someone else that evening I can only remember his contribution. I remember his amazing ability, as Kavanagh put it, to 'Set an old phrase burning', his ability to satirise the norms of a petty bourgeois State and its icons, to set certain habits and values in crystal and then smash them. My favourite memory is the first time I heard him read Making Love Outside Áras an Uachtaráin. He will be sadly missed, not just by Neasa and his family, but by those people who were privileged to hear him either in person or on RTÉ. Sit ei terra levis. Aifric McGlinchey I was moved to tears when I heard at the Cork International Poetry Festival that we've lost Paul Durcan. In a room full of poets, we held a two-minute silence for him. And then Mary O'Malley read Googletown, which she dedicated to him. No other poet in Ireland has seemed to me more in keeping with the mystical wavelengths of connection than Paul Durcan. At the microphone, his range of tones and his presence commanded absolute attention. To hear him read was to be imbued with the sense of a transcendent light shining on each person, object or scene described. The listener would be embodied by a spirit of joy or outrage or empathy, swept up in the ebullience of his quirky originality. Durcan's poetry has that bewitching quality of effortlessness, along with wit and mercurial melancholy. If playfulness and intimacy are defining features in his work, he also proved to be the most versatile of poets: one moment, concrete, visually kinetic, the next, shape-shifting to combine topicality in ways no other poet can quite emulate. Quirky, fey, or a wrecking ball for social justice, his poems have a quality unique to him. Whether as seer or participant, young boy or a woman aged 81 'and new as a snowdrop', the speaker of his poems invites the reader to dive into a landscape or cityscape populated with people, birds, animals, fish, feeling and ideas, and experience that sense of recognition. I first met Paul at the 40th Hennessy awards. He was the judge of the Emerging Poetry competition and had chosen me as the winner. On the strength of that award, I think, my publisher offered to publish my debut collection. So, Paul Durcan was instrumental in beginning my life as a published poet. He also gave me a lovely endorsement for that debut. I met him again at the Ennis Book Festival, where I was invited to introduce him. He was warm, attentive, made proper eye contact. The kind of person that made you feel seen and heard. What an unusual and memorable individual. We have lost one of Ireland's most iconic poets. But we are lucky to have the legacy of his work. Affectionate, satirical, insightful, the immediacy of his cumulative observations brings us to this understanding: here we all are. The small rooms of his poems add up to a mansion of lived life. The totality of his work could be seen as a colloquial, cultural and psychological archive of what it means to be living in Ireland, in the world, at this moment in the continuum of history. Durcan never forgot the web of connection between self and world, between what we do in our solitude and in our most public interactions. Any time I need uplifting, I read his poems, and come away appreciating more fully our core human desire to connect, and to celebrate, even in dark times, this miraculous life. Enda Wyley I first met Paul Durcan in 1990. I was in my early twenties and took part in his poetry workshops in Trinity College, Dublin where he was Writer Fellow that year. Mostly, Paul told us stories about poets he knew, particularly Michael Hartnett, whom he revered. How could I ever forget the one of himself and Hartnett presenting themselves at the headquarters of Securicor in 1960s London only to both be hired – two young Irish poets in uniforms and peaked hats being dispatched to guard a financial institution and an air transport terminal in London. A tale worthy of a Paul Durcan poem, for sure. 'This head is a poet's head/ this head holds a galaxy,' Michael Hartnett once wrote, and I have always been convinced that Paul Durcan's head also held just that – a marvellous galaxy that lit up our poetry firmament. Today that light has gone out with the devastating news that Paul Durcan, the greatest of poets, has died. May he rest in peace. Martin Doyle I interviewed Paul Durcan in 1993 in London for The Irish Post to mark the publication by Harvill of A Snail in My Prime, his new and selected poems. I was struck by his mild demeanour, given the provocative titles of some of his works, such as Archbishop of Kerry to Have Abortion. He had an unrivalled reputation as a reader of his work, who, his fellow poet Derek Mahon wrote, 'with a microphone for a lute, can, like Orpheus, charm the birds from the trees'. 'The saying of poetry is what poetry is,' he told me. 'So I don't think of the tweo things as separate, they go together, it;s a form odf music. Every time you read, you never know if the house of cards is going to collapse or whether you'll get over Becher's Brook. Perhaps that's a better way of looking at it. These riders have ridden over the course God knows how many times but they never know if this is going to be the day.' As a kind of postscript to our interview, Durcan spoke of having spent several years after leaving school in London and how England had been good to him, which made the IRA's bombing campaign in Britain that much harder to accept. 'Like many Irish people, I feel helplessly angry with what the IRA do because London was a home to me when I had nowhere else to go. It gave me work, work which I wouldn't have got back in Ireland. I worked in the London Planetarium where my official job title was Stellar Manipulator. I was the guy who flung the stars up on the ceiling and here I was married and here my children were born. This country has been home to thousands and thousands of Irish people.' He feared that we would not learn the lessons of our troubled past. 'There's a poem in this book, In Memory of Those Murdered in the Dublin Massacre, May 1974. And I noticed when I read the poem here or back in Ireland people don't remember, they've forgotten.' Paul Durcan and his poetry will, however, be long remembered.
Irish Times
14-05-2025
- Business
- Irish Times
New Oireachtas Committee on Infrastructure is an absurd culmination of a dysfunctional system
The chronic inability of the State to get big projects done was on display in Monday's edition of The Irish Times. On page one we read how a decades-long failure to invest in water and wastewater infrastructure in the Dublin region has now put the ambitious plan to build 6,000 homes in the former Dublin Industrial Estate in Glasnevin under threat. Uisce Éireann (otherwise known as Irish Water) had to remind Dublin City Council of this unfortunate point after the local authority published its draft Ballyboggan master plan, which covered the 77-acre site. Sitting beside it on the front page was a story about how the costs of the yet-to-be-built National Maternity Hospital , Dublin, has increased tenfold to €2 billion during the 10 years since the project was announced. READ MORE Much of the intervening decade was consumed by an increasingly-redundant row about the extent to which octogenarian nuns will impose the will of the Catholic church on a bunch of money-mad hospital consultants. Senior health service figures are credited with having to break the bad news to Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill . Turn to page three and there is a piece about how the first tower block on the site of the former Irish Glass Bottle factory site in Ringsend, Dublin, may not contain any affordable housing. Planning permission for the development – which provides for up to 3,800 houses – is contingent on 15 per cent of the apartments being affordable housing. It appears, however, that nobody nailed down the when, where and how much of this. The council is now in negotiations with two multibillion-dollar US property funds – Lioncor and Oaktree – which are fronted by the precociously litigious Johnny Ronan . Hard to see that ending well. This particular bit of bad news seems to have been brought to the Government's attention by the Sinn Féin housing spokesman Eoin Ó Broin . A few pages further on we read that the Government's plans for four large offshore wind farms that are the keystone of its strategy to hit net zero are in disarray. The promoters of one farm – on the Sceirde Rocks off Connemara – have already pulled it amid planning delays. The proximate reason is that the weather in Connemara turned out to be worse than they thought. The other three projects are now in doubt following the cancellation of similar project off the coast of Yorkshire, northern England, because of rising costs and the risk of delays. The read-across for the Irish projects – which have locked in the price they will get for the energy they will generate at a lower cost than the British project – is not very encouraging. Given that none of them has got through planning and all are opposed by fringe interests who would happily take their campaigns the whole way to the United Nations if they were let, it must be tempting to just cut and run. Finally, a few columns over on the same page was a report that the Dublin Metrolink railway project to connect Dublin Airport to the city centre is likely to cost a fifth more than its budget of €9.5 billion and is unlikely to be completed by 2035. This particular wake-up-call was delivered by Seán Sweeney, the New Zealander brought in to run the project. It's hard to know exactly what all this proves. There is no shortage of culprits for this sorry state of affairs of which planning is the favourite. As Sweeney succinctly put it: 'The situation in Ireland where pretty well anyone can object to anything and stop it for six months or nine months is not good for Ireland.' The planning system is, however, only an outworking of a political system that seems to overly promote the concerns of individuals over the common good. Clientelist politics supercharged by an electoral system that fosters intraparty competition for Dáil seats gets the blame for this. The effect is without a doubt corrosive. A new Oireachtas Committee on Infrastructure has been established, which in theory is meant to address the problem of why we are so bad at delivering large projects. It is unlikely to add much to the sum of human knowledge, but it will provide a valuable platform for TDs and senators who need to make headlines out of problems rather than solve them if they want to get re-elected. Expect to hear a lot of special pleading on behalf of constituents alongside the scolding of executives. In many ways, the committee is the absurd culmination of this dysfunctional system. It actually needs failure if it is to function effectively for its members. There is little mileage in committee hearings where Uisce Éireann executives come in to tell TDs and Senators about the excellent progress being made on upgrading the sewers in north Dublin because the Oireachtas had passed the necessary reforms and had cleared the way for the funding to be provided.
Irish Times
11-05-2025
- Business
- Irish Times
Concerns over cost of Johnny Ronan's affordable housing plans at former Glass Bottle site in Dublin
Concerns are mounting over the provision of affordable housing at the former Irish Glass Bottle site in Ringsend with no deal on cost reached between Dublin City Council and a Johnny Ronan -fronted development consortium. Pembroke Beach is close to completing construction of the first 570 homes at the former industrial lands on the Poolbeg Peninsula, designated for an urban quarter with up to 3,800 apartments. However, in an email to Sinn Féin housing spokesman Eoin Ó Broin , the council has said there is 'no agreement in place for the delivery of 'affordable homes' in phase one' of the development, with the costs making a deal 'very challenging' to achieve. It was indicated last year that the apartments in the scheme would cost €495,000 for a one-bed and €675,000 for a two-bed. READ MORE While eligible affordable house purchasers are given a State subsidised discount on market rates, the high indicative cost of the apartments would still put them out of reach of most low- to middle-income buyers. The land on the peninsula at the east end of the city has been vacant for more than 20 years following the closure of the Glass Bottle Company in 2002. [ Johnny Ronan venture to seek planning permission for 20-storey tower on Irish Glass Bottle site Opens in new window ] The site was bought in 2006 for €412 million by a consortium involving developer Bernard McNamara and the Dublin Docklands Development Authority. The National Asset Management Agency ( Nama ) bought the debt associated with the site from the now defunct Anglo Irish Bank after the property crash. The council drafted plans, approved by the cabinet in 2016, for a strategic development zone designation for the land in order to speed up the regeneration of the area, particularly for housing. In May 2017, the council, Nama and the Department of Housing reached agreement that 15 per cent of the apartments would be used for affordable housing. The council initially entered into negotiations with Nama in relation to the affordable homes and said it would be willing to buy plots of land from the State agency. However, Nama instead offered the site to the market with the Ronan-led consortium confirmed as the preferred bidder in December 2020. The council has since been in negotiations with Pembroke Beach but has been unable to finalise a deal. Sinn Féin senator Chris Andrews , previously a TD for the area, said the community had 'fought for nearly a decade' to secure homes which could be bought at affordable prices '[The council] has informed us that the delivery of these affordable homes is in doubt, and that it is unlikely that any social or affordable homes will be included in phase one of this development,' Mr Andrews said. 'This is entirely unacceptable for local residents, who have had to endure skyrocketing housing prices, insufficient social housing and years of broken promises from the Government.' The council told Sinn Féin there was no requirement for affordable housing to be part of any particular phase, and that the developer was working on a proposal to deliver the 'affordable component across the full development' but there was 'no defined time frame for this as yet'. The council has confirmed there 'is not yet an agreement in place for the delivery of 'affordable homes' in phase 1' and has told the Irish Times the 'affordable housing component is subject to a commercial agreement being reached with the developer that takes account of funding and value for money considerations'. Pembroke Beach, which includes Lioncor and Oaktree Capital , as well as Ronan Group Real Estate , declined to comment. However, it is understood the developer intends to allocate an apartment block in the first phase for social and affordable housing, pending agreement on the affordable element.
