Ulick O’Connor’s funeral told he asked radical questions about our lifestyle – The Irish Times

“Some people imagined Ulick O’Connor was indifferent to his Catholic faith,” said Fr Patrick Ryan, celebrating the writer’s funeral Mass on Friday.

“But he was nothing of the sort. And in some ways Ulick was a bit of a Christ-like figure himself. If we can learn anything from Ulick, it’s the importance of asking radical questions about our lifestyle.”

The funeral of Ulick O’Connor, writer, poet, historian and public intellectual, a contrarian and a controversialist, offered a window onto his life.

It was at the Church of the Three Patrons in Rathgar, and area where he lived throughout his life in Fairfield Park, his childhood home.

Fr Ryan said Ulick O’Connor had a lot in common with the first president of his former university, UCD, Cardinal Newman, who will be canonised this weekend.

“Both were pernickety, and controversial, somewhat contrarian. Both loved to play with words and the English language”, and chose targets from both the top of society and the bottom of the heap.

“If on occasion O’Connor’s voice was sharp or shrill, it was because he was impatient, with fake news and insincerity,” said Fr Ryan.

Mr O’Connor died on Monday, aged 90. He was buried a day before his 91st birthday on October 12th.

Chief mourners were O’Connor’s niece Mary (daughter of Mr Connor’s late sister Noirin Buckley), along with her sons, Mr O’Connor’s nephews Neil, Mark and Peter Buckley and his long-time personal assistant and friend Anna Harrison.

The President was represented by aide-de-camp Capt Emmett Gallagher, and the Taoiseach was represented by aide-de-camp Commdt James Morrin. Mr O’Connor was the eldest of five children; his brothers Michael, Garrett and Donough pre-deceased him.

Man of faith

“As a man of faith, he knew death was merely a gateway to another life,” the priest told the congregation.

The eulogy was read by actor Patrick Bergin, best known for his 1991 film Sleeping with the Enemy. Bergin recalled watching “Ulick and Gaybo on the Late Late Show, angry in their pomposity. To a young kid in Drimnagh, I thought they were awful eejits altogether.”

But later when he came to study literature, Mr Bergin said, he came to respect his understanding of Irish literature. He had “the good fortune,” some years later, “to become part of Ulick’s circle,” he said, when he performed with Adrian Dunbar in a 2005 revival of Ulick O’Connor’s 1988 play A Trinity of Two.

It was, said Bergin a difficult subject matter, dealing with Oscar Wilde’s trial and Edward Carson. As an indication of O’Connor’s warmth, Bergin recalled O’Connor pointing out to him, of playing Edward Carson, “remember this, Patrick, Edward Carson said ‘No, the man has suffered enough’.”

Mr Bergin read from WB Yeats’ The Song of Wandering Aengus, and concluded with a quote from Dylan Thomas’s poem And Death Shall have no Dominion.

Fr John Flavin, representing St Mary’s in Rathmines, where O’Connor went to school, concelebrated mass.

Fr Patrick Ryan from Kenya and of the Mill Hill Fathers, a missionary order in Orwell Park, Rathgar, said it was accidental that he was celebrating the funeral; he was in Dublin to run the marathon. But he knew Ulick O’Connor, as a boy and a student.

Boxed

They both boxed, and Fr Ryan recalled him at the National Stadium, saying he was very generous with his sporting advice and tips. Later he was a speaker in demand at UCD, when Fr Ryan was a student.

Symbols of his Mr O’Connor’s life were brought to the altar, including a hat representing his profession as barrister, and representing his sporting, journalistic and literary lives, a trophy for winning welterweight boxing champion of British and Irish universities in 1950, a copy of the Irish Independent and his biography of Oliver St John Gogarty.

Organist David McConnell accompanied tenor Paul Byrom for hymns including Morning has Broken, Psalm 23 (The Lord is my Shepherd), Schubert’s Ave Maria, Panis Angelicus and, at the end, You Raise Me Up.

At the end, O’Connor’s niece Mary Buckley read a poem for his nanny, Annie Bell from Tyrone, which he wrote after her death.

Mourners

Among those at the funeral were; journalist Vincent Browne, Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald and the party’s former president Gerry Adams, Mr O’Connor’s friend James Cawley and his wife Susann, Dr Conor O’Malley, whose mother Mary O’Malley founded the Lyric theatre in Belfast and was a great friend of O’Connor, actor Geraldine Plunkett, musician Donal Lunny, Caroline Fitzgerald who directed Patrick Bergin in O’Connor’s A Trinity of Two, politician and author Mannix Flynn, composer Bill Whelan, artist Robert Ballagh, playwrights Bernard Farrell and Jimmy Murphy, Dr Cyril White a friend and formerly of UCD, Herald editor Alan Steenson and colleagues and former colleagues from Independent Newspapers Campbell Spray, Liam Collins, Maurice Haugh and ex-Horsplip Eamonn Carr, writer Anne Haverty, literary publicist Cormac Kinsella who worked with O’Connor on his last poetry collection The Kiss, Marina Guinness, whose mother Mariga was a good friend of O’Connor’s, Michael Smith from Village magazine, journalist Alan Sweetman, who was a researcher for O’Connor’s book Celtic Dawn, Trevor White of the Little Museum of Dublin and publisher Stephen Stokes.

Prayers of the faithful were by his niece Mary Buckley, Laura Kilgallon, Ciara Harrison and Paul Kilgallon.

Remembering his days as a panellist on the Late Late Show, Fr Ryan talked about a CD of O’Connor in conversation about Irish writers , and said – though he swore he would not use the phrase – there was a copy of the CD “for everyone in the audience” as gifts for the mourners as they left.

tural and political issues.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)