Tributes paid at removal of Anthony Clare

The removal of Prof Anthony Clare, the eminent psychiatrist who died suddenly last Sunday, took place to his parish church in Lucan, Dublin, yesterday.

In a simple service of liturgy, poetry and humour, parish curate Fr Paul Taylor described him as "a gift to life", tracing his life's journey through its "spectacular earlier successes" to his later years of work and healing at St Edmundsbury.

His journey ended in Paris, after he had travelled by boat from his "beloved" Sardinia to Nice and from there by TGV to the French capital, in the company of Jane, his wife of more than 40 years, "his love, his friend and his soulmate", in the words of their son, Simon.

The photograph placed on his coffin was of the two of them, taken on a trip to Zambia.

In a touching and humorous eulogy, Simon talked about a man whose "serious, intense, smooth" media persona was a world away from the father and husband they knew.

This was a man who was "incredibly" creative and self-deprecating, "always willing to play the fool and act the maggot . . . rolling around on the floor with his children, behaving like an idiot", making up funny words and wonderful stories.

On the other hand, his irascibility when stressed or under pressure - often "totally self-created" - was the stuff of legend. Many in the congregation smiled at the description of his well-known facility for turning a minor issue into a drama and a drama into a crisis, usually involving lost car keys. On one famous occasion, with the family car all packed and children in place ready for a return trip to England, the keys were finally located in a bin (where he had dropped them) after the ferry had long since sailed.

"In recent years it was always Dad who would walk in when the dog had chewed a pillow or eaten the shopping and he would lose it completely. There was something of the Basil Fawlty in Dad in these moments . . . So frequent were these minor catastrophes and mini-disasters that the family coined the phrase 'doing a Dad' to describe his performances".

Family holidays to France and Italy also involved major drama, often a broken-down car or a suitcase flying off the roof rack.

In more recent years, when their seven children were grown, the couple had homes in Sardinia and in Kerry. "He would have been so relieved that when he passed away he was alone with Mum, in a city he loved, on a romantic occasion that he had created . . . It is so desperately sad that such a good man has been taken from us when, with retirement approaching, he still has so much more to give as a husband, as a father and as a grandfather. Death is probably the only thing he has been early for in his whole life. I just pray that when he gets to heaven he doesn't need his car keys."

The gathering included friends from Anthony Clare's debating days in UCD, such as broadcaster Henry Kelly, writer and historian Ruth Dudley Edwards, Mr Justice Richard Johnston and psychiatrist Harry Crawley.

"Tony was probably the best clinical debater we ever came across," Henry Kelly recalled.

The chief mourners were his wife Jane, and the couple's seven children, Sebastian, Justine, Sophie, Peter, Eleanor, Simon and Rachel, his grandchildren and his sister Jeanne. The huge congregation also included the aides de camp to President Mary McAleese and Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, Minister for Justice Brian Lenihan and Minister for Health Mary Harney, Chief Justice John Murray, Mr Justice Hugh Geoghegan, Ms Justice Mary Finlay Geoghegan, Prof Enda McDonagh, Fr Noel Barber SJ, Prof Ivor Browne, Dr Eimer Philbin-Bowman, Michael D Higgins TD, Paul Gilligan of the ISPCC, and Gerry Ryan of RTÉ.

Prof Clare will be buried after a private funeral service in Kerry tomorrow.