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IN CORK HE was known as Coroner Horgan. As a teenage reporter sent with a sinking heart to record an inquest at the City Morgue I was calmed by his courtesy, reassured that there would be no corpse and relieved by his easy dispatch of details I could hardly spell, let alone stomach. We were to meet many times again, briefly and on business, but that politesse was unfailing, one felt better about oneself simply for being its recipient.

To see him walk along the South Mall, then a promenade for the city’s legal and financial elite, made the town seem important merely because it had such a man in it. That was just noting his presence; of his achievements I, like many other Corkonians, had little or no knowledge, except for that single wondrous moment in which, presiding at the inquest on the victims of the torpedoed Lusitaniain 1915, he had pronounced a verdict of wilful and wholesale murder against the Kaiser.