Long day’s journey into Nenagh - Frank McNally on the stress of covering celebrity funerals

After Friday’s funeral for the ages in Nenagh, I was looking forward to de-stressing over a beer at The Irish Times Christmas party, which had started at 6.30pm.

You might think that a funeral is not something you need to de-stress after. But if you’re covering it for a newspaper, especially as what we call a “colour” writer – who’s supposed to capture the essence of the event as well as the mere facts – it can be hard work.

Arriving three hours early – a lifetime record – I had first spent time scouring the streets of the town, looking for something definitive.

Then as Mass time neared, I fretted over committing to being inside the church, where there were still seats available, or staying outside, where most people would end up.

Hard Border – Frank McNally on a visit to the Korean Demilitarised Zone

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Transmigration of Seoul – Frank McNally on a long-awaited trip to South Korea

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Son of the soil – Colm Keena on the occasional delights of getting our hands dirty

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The ‘Bots’ marks the seasons in our busy city

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After trying to ride both horses for a while, I decided inside was best. But there were no seats left by then, so I squeezed in among the standers in a side aisle.

Unfortunately, it soon became apparent that standing in the aisles would not be tolerated and that anyone without a seat would be ejected.

And now this was a terrible prospect. To paraphrase Luke 13:28: “There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth when you see Johnny and Nick and Gerry and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, but your wicked selves being thrown out.”

Sure enough, over the next hour, there were repeated if polite offensives by the ushers. And the main aisle, where the standers would have impeded the pallbearers, was soon enough cleared.

But the moral imperative to vacate the side aisles was less compelling, so I hung in grimly and, whenever the usher made another attempt to oust me, I pretended to be jotting down some note of urgent importance, while pleading “Just give me another minute, please.”

This became a running joke with the usher-in-chief. “Have you enough notes yet?” he would ask with a smile, granting yet another reprieve.

Amid the crush at one point, I noticed an ID tag for “official steward” on the floor. And God forgive me, I considered appropriating it (it’s what Woodward and Bernstein would have done if they were on funeral colour), except the rest of the lanyard was missing.

So instead, I glued myself to a pillar, metaphorically, like a climate change protester, until the ushers gave up. I was one of only three or four still standing in the aisle by then.

At many events, the colour writer’s bane is a shortage of anything interesting. Here, the problem was the sheer surfeit of colourful detail, which had me scrawling page after page of notes.

And as magnificently mad as the whole thing was, it also went on and on, eating into the time remaining to deadline and twisting my stomach in knots.

I had to leave before the end, and it was strange to exit the church into a corral of eager, excited faces, many clearly hoping for Johnny Depp and crestfallen to see I was just some randomer.

Then I retreated to a hotel on the town’s outskirts and, seeking asylum from the deluge that would follow, installed myself in a quiet spot under a stairs to begin reducing the greatest funeral ever to 700 words.

Sometime later, my colleague, Bryan O’Brien, took a picture of me there, which has since gone viral on Twitter/X because (despite the shortcomings of the model) it looks like a painting. But I was in too much of a panic to notice.

Anyway, I made my deadline, just. And traipsing back towards the official funeral car park afterwards, it occurred to me I hadn’t eaten for 10 hours. Should I get a takeaway? No, if I made good time to Dublin, there still might be a few cocktail sausages left at the party.

That’s when I realised another deadline had slipped by unseen: the one by which I was supposed to retrieve my car. A closed car park gate now confronted me, with a padlock. And there was no sign saying where I might contact the keyholder.

Nor was there any friendly pub or shop nearby to offer advice. So I rang the celebrity undertaker, Philly Ryan, but he couldn’t work out from my description where the car park even was, never mind who had the keys.

Then I tried the Garda station and they didn’t know either but said leave it with them: they’d ring the council. In the meantime, I took to strolling desolately around the town, mentally relocating an old Pogues song: “Now the winter comes down, and I can’t stand the chill/That comes to the streets around Christmas time/I’m buggered to damnation and I haven’t got a penny/To wander the dark streets of Nenagh.”

But fair play to the guards. They somehow tracked down the man with the keys, who released me from bondage after only some weeping and gnashing of teeth. I was back in Dublin by midnight, albeit too late for this year’s party.