Tommie Gorman loved funerals. He took funeral attendance “to a level of high art. I can imagine him coming home from this and saying jeez, it was great, full to the rafters. Kieran and Sinéad were incredible on the music. Fr Christy was on fire.”
Joe Gorman was speaking about his father at Gorman’s funeral Mass in Our Lady Star of the Sea Church, at Ransboro, Co Sligo on Saturday afternoon.
“Tommie loved funerals because his lifeblood was connection. There was nobody he couldn’t connect with, even if they were a Shamrock Rovers fan.” His father “loved people, and he told his friend Martin McGuinness that generosity was the greatest weapon.”
He would say “that the most admired presidents and prime ministers are just people like the rest of us at the end of the day. But he would also say the same about people that were despised. He would find your humanity, even if you tried to hide it from him, and he would love you for that.”
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Gorman’s “respect for politicians as people that just wanted to do good” was, Joe thought, cemented by an experience in 1994 when his father was first diagnosed with cancer and Pádraig Flynn [then European commissioner for social affairs] told Tommie to “get the best treatment he could, and that he could pay for anything as long as he had the money”. His father did not need to call on that offer, even if he could.
His father “loved Sligo to its roots, and “used to get giddy crossing the Curlews”. He “always referenced that Springsteen song – you only have one hometown”.
His great phrase was “what is life, but love and sport? And in sport, as in love, the imperfections are the most beautiful thing of all. He wrote that Rovers are the perfect fit for Sligo because of the flaws. We are never the finished article.”
Gorman believed, “not just in some religious sense”, and he “loved people who believed”, people like journalists John Healy, Tom Lyons, and Ian Kehoe who set up their own publications.
Or “his friend John O’Mahony” the football manager who brought in Tommie as video analyst 30 years before. Or Ed Mulhall, “the best boss he ever had”.
Once a friend, who was having a great time, announced that “when I die, I’m coming back as meself.”
Joe Gorman said: “I think we’d all agree that Tommie would do the same.”
Mass celebrant Fr Christopher McCrann spoke of how so many people over recent days were in shock at news of Gorman’s death, “some really devastated.” For himself, “my heart sank.”
It also meant that “I won’t be able to tell him to stop bothering me with his never-ending questions” and then “more questions until the point of wearing you down. You know, at times, Tommie could be a real pain in the butt.”
Quoting a friend of his own Fr McCrann said that one of Gorman’s qualities was “the sacrament of friendship.” Each person “was special and unique to him and he managed, like St Paul, to ‘become all things to all people’. ”
As a journalist he had “a very particular and unique force towards mediation and unity and always with a sense of great hope for a better future”. He also “suffered, as we know, but he did not allow it to be his identity”.
One of Gorman’s striking features was that “he was a man of faith and he proclaimed it with his life and talked about it freely.” As a parishioner “he was a living witness to that faith and a true believer in eternal life.”
And while he was “without doubt, a great talker,” he was also “a quiet and discreet man. In the words of our home-grown Yeats: ‘It’s long since we began/To call up to mind/This wise and simple man.’”
Fr McCrann concluded “we who remain thank you Tommie Gorman because you have walked with great nobility among us”.
As the Mass ended, Gorman’s wife Ceara and her sisters sang (Talk to Me Of) Mendocino, by Kate and Anna McGarrigle).
Chief mourners were Ceara and their children Moya and Joe, as well as his sister Mary and brother Michael.
The large attendance included Capt Paul O’Donnell, representing President Michael D Higgins, Taoiseach Simon Harris, Mayor of Sligo Declan Bree, Northern Ireland’s First Minister Michelle O’Neill, Minister of State Dara Calleary, Frank Feighan TD, Martin Kenny TD, former tánaiste Dick Spring and former minister for justice Charlie Flanagan.
There too were Arlene Foster and Peter Robinson of the DUP, Alasdair McDonnell and Dr Joe Hendron of the SDLP, former Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams. RTÉ Director General Kevin Bakhurst, as well as RTÉ colleagues Cahal Goan, Ed Mulhall, Julian Vignoles, Anne Cassin, Bryan Dobson, Carole Coleman, Mary Wilson, Vincent Kearney, Joe Little, Seán O’Rourke and Ray Burke.
Other journalists present included Mark Hennessy, Marese McDonagh and Gerry Moriarty of The Irish Times, John Downing of the Irish Independent and Tom Lyons and Ian Kehoe of the Currency.
Burial took place afterwards at the nearby Kilmacowen cemetery.
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