The snow fell gently but relentlessly on the pine trees outside St Columba's Church in Glenties as the congregation gathered on March 3rd to pay tribute to Dr Malachy McCluskey, who had been a towering and much loved figure in the community for more than 60 years. Liam McCormack's church looked beautiful in the white setting but it was sadly obvious that many who would have wished to bid farewell to a man who had tended to so many families over the years would not be able to brave the elements.
He was a big man in every way. He was interested in everything around him and in meeting people from all walks of life. Because reading and keeping informed were essential to him, it was a cruel blow when, in recent times, he practically lost his sight. Only last July, he sat in his wheelchair at the front of a large audience, assembled at the MacGill Summer School, to listen to a panel of politicians enunciate their policies on the way ahead in Northern Ireland. When I looked over to see how he was, I saw that he was listening to every word with rapt attention, as he had done at almost every session of the school over the years. Nor, when he felt like it, did he have any problem about making his own point, forcibly and unambiguously, from the floor.
He took a particular interest, of course, in what was going on in Northern Ireland and deplored the sectarianism in society there. His father, James, had served in the Royal Irish Constabulary and had been stationed in Belfast, far enough away from his native Donegal where the political landscape was turbulent. When the force was disbanded he had to leave the city because of loyalist threats and retire back home to his wife's place in Kilraine outside Glenties with their son, Malachy who had been born in Belfast in 1915. Here he was under threat from a different source until one of the local IRA leaders guaranteed his safety in the immediate area.
When in 1928 the situation had calmed down in the North, James and his wife and son moved back to Belfast where young Malachy won a scholarship to St Malachy's College.
Having finished his studies there, he opted to study medicine at Queen's University and qualified in 1937 at the incredibly young age of 22. He went to England for hospital training, getting valuable experience under a famous orthopaedic surgeon in the Manchester Royal Infirmary, Sir Harry Platt, and at the Liverpool Royal Infirmary under Dr Harry Cohen, later Lord Cohen of Birkenhead.
Back in Glenties in 1939, there were no prospects but, as he was about to join the RAF at the outbreak of war, he was offered a temporary post in charge of the dispensary in the Killybegs area. It was the ideal opportunity for him to learn Irish in the nearby Gaeltacht of Teelin/Carrick, which stood to him when a post became vacant in 1942 in the Gaeltacht area of Doochary.
Although poverty was everywhere, it was alleviated by the money that was being sent home from Britain from the men and women from the area who were employed in the war effort there. Sanitation and hygiene were practically non-existent, diseases such as TB and diphtheria were rampant and it was difficult terrain but the young and affable Dr McCluskey would go out on call any time of the day or night to people in need of help. If they couldn't afford the standard £1 fee, he took whatever they could afford which was sometimes not a great deal.
When he moved to Glenties two years later, where he would minister for over 40 years until his retirement in 1985, he continued his policy of always answering a call and frequently would arrive at the house where there was somebody ill at three or four o'clock in the morning wearing an overcoat over his pyjamas and always in good humour and never resentful. It was public service in the full meaning of the term. Always approachable and understanding, he believed that it was important to listen to the patient who, in his or her isolation, might be sometimes just in need of a kind word or a bit of encouragement.
He was the country doctor par excellence who knew and loved his own people and it is difficult to see his shoes ever being totally filled in the area by any other general practitioner.
He got involved fully in the life of Glenties, worked tirelessly for the benefit of everyone and was instrumental in bringing improvement to the picturesque little town, such as the health centre which today bears his name. He and his second wife, Anne, a distinguished gynaecologist, formed a gentle and effective medical partnership and her passing in 1997 was quite a blow to Malachy, particularly as his first wife, Patricia, had died at a very young age in 1944 leaving him with two young children, Malachy junior and Claire.
The legend that he became in his lifetime was, of course, enhanced by his love of traditional music and of the fiddle in particular, which he had learned at his mother's place and played with accomplishment. It was very fitting that one of the remaining great Glenties fiddlers, Vincent Campbell, was in St Columba's Church on that snowy March morning to send "the doc"on his way.
Ar dheis Dé a anam dhílis.
J.M.