Hi Dad. I don’t what to say. You were so alive, all your life. And somehow you never grew old. The last time I met you, you were still young. You still moved with all the energy of a young man. Even though your knees were going, and you’d had cataract surgery, and your naps in front of the telly were getting longer – even though I knew you were 89, and nobody lasts forever – when you got up out of the chair, you were fully alive. You were a young man startled to be in an old body. Which is why your death has come as a such a shock. Surely there is a law that says you have to grow old first, Dad. You have to give us warning.
But you got the end you wanted. You always said you wanted to go out like a light. Click. You didn’t want to hang around. And you’ve been telling us for years not to be sad when you’re gone. That you weren’t worried about it, so we shouldn’t be. That you’d be perfectly happy back with your mother and your grandmother, up on the Rock, within sight of the pub you grew up in, in Ballydine. And you said, look out for a bird flying over the Rock, looking around… that’ll be me. OK dad, I will.
Dad was born at a different time, in a different world. His mother, Mary Crummy, wasn’t married to his father, Dick Gough, at the time (although they did marry later). So his Mum went to England to have him. At that time, most unmarried Irish women did not get to keep their child. But she loved him and she wanted him and she hung onto him. He was always tremendously grateful for that, because he knew his life could have gone very differently.
I think the angriest I ever saw him was after he saw the film Philomena, about a child taken away from his mother by the nuns. It could have been him. Those lost children were his spiritual brothers and sisters. But he knew he was wanted, and he knew he was loved, and I think that gave him a solid foundation that he was able to build his whole life on.
When the second World War broke out, he was evacuated from Walton-on-the-Naze, which was getting bombed, back to his grandmother’s pub in Ballydine. He was okay about that, because he had been promised a pony. His father, who was also living in England, met his mother at the train station, and gave Dad a saddle. Dad’s mother had a locked elbow, a stiff arm, because they’d left it too long in the cast, when she’d broken her arm as a child, and it had set. So she put the saddle on the arm, she put Dad on the saddle, and she carried him back to Ireland.
And from that point on, he basically brought himself up. His grandmother and his aunt were busy running the pub, he had no parents around, and so he was kind of free to become fully himself, in a way that was quite rare at the time. Still is.
And he did a great job of it. From about the age of 10, he would just head off across the fields, and call into every house in the parish for a chat. And they would all offer him a cup of tea, or a scone, or a slice of cake. And he would always say yes, and never let on how many he’d had already that day. Does that sound familiar?
When he was 18 he went to Belfast, joined the RAF and asked to be sent overseas. When they asked him where he wanted to go, he said, how far away have you got? No disrespect to Tipperary, but if he was going to see the world, he wanted to see a lot of it.
So he went by ship through the Suez Canal to Singapore. He spent three wonderful years there as a fireman at Changi Airport, “scraping the flyboys off the runway” as he put it. And I think it was those years abroad that made him one of the most open-minded and least judgemental people I have ever met. He saw the good in everyone and he took everyone for who they truly were. He wasn’t interested in the labels or the colours or the religions or any of that.
Back in England, he worked as a firefighter at Heathrow Airport. And he met Betty Grogan, a young nurse also from south Tipp, at the Gresham Ballroom in Highgate. And they fell in love and they got married, and they stayed in love and they stayed married till now. Sixty years later. They loved each other so much… Desmond and I were born.
Dad moved back to Tipperary in 1973 with his young family because he got a job as Second County Fire Officer for Tipperary North Riding, as it was then.
And over the next couple of decades, he helped modernise the Irish Fire Service, starting with the seven stations under his command. When he arrived, Cloughjordan Fire Station, for example, was a wheelbarrow and a couple of buckets and reels of hose, all stored in a little red shed that didn’t come up to his chin. (They did have a ladder, but it wouldn’t fit in the shed.) His generation of fire officers all received their training in modern firefighting techniques at the British Fire Service College at Moreton-in-Marsh in England.
Dad and a few friends realised Ireland desperately needed its own fire training centre, so they set it up, and he and a handful of other Second County Fire Officers trained the people, who trained the people, who trained the current excellent generation of Irish firefighters – many of whom helped bring his body to this church today, formed the guard of honour, and will be bringing him to the Rock after this service. He would have been very happy to see that; I am very grateful for it, as are the rest of the family.
He has saved a lot of lives. And he has seen a lot of lives lost. As the officer in charge of operations, he had to attend every fatal incident in north Tipperary and write a report. Every fire, every car crash, every drowning attended by any of the seven brigades in north Tipperary. As a consequence, he saw seven times more death than any ordinary firefighter. And yet he was the jolliest man I ever knew. The most cheerful man I ever met. And the only hint I ever had that he was, in fact, deeply affected by all this was that sometimes he would come home from work and Mum would make Dad his special dinner. We didn’t think anything of it: Dad seemed his cheerful self and ate his special dinner with his usual gusto. Only many years later did I discover that he had his special dinners on days he had attended fatal fires, particularly if children were involved, and he couldn’t handle the smell of cooked meat.
His happiness, his joy in life, his pleasure at being alive in the world, was earned. And my God he loved being alive. Fishing, swimming, hockey, golfing, woodworking, making his sculptures, taxidermy. Singing with the choral society. Acting with the Nenagh Players. Not just acting but building sets, making the props, doing front of house, sticking up the posters…
Even though he never touched a drop of alcohol and was extremely proud of his gold Pioneer pin, he loved a bit of ceol agus craic in a good pub.
Just walking down the street with him was exhausting. He knew everybody and everybody knew him. He’d pop into every second shop for a chat, he’d greet and hug half the people we passed. A hundred yards could take half an hour.
It was like living with Santa Claus. A part he also played many times over the years, for many organisations, recently including the Suaimhneas Cancer Support Centre in Nenagh, where he was Santa Claus and Mum was Mrs Claus for grown-ups who weren’t always sure how many more Christmases they would be seeing.
You just can’t sum him up in a few minutes and I won’t try. He was unique. He was a uniquely warm and loving man. He was funny and he was kind. He was remarkably kind.
He was an excellent husband to Betty, a magnificent father to myself and Desmond, a terrific grandfather to Sophie and Arlo and a fabulous friend to so many of you. To so many of us.
He was my first, my best and my oldest friend. I am going to miss him so much. Goodbye Dad, I love you and I always will. Rest in peace. You did good.
