Writer Julian Gough’s eulogy to his father, who died last month and was buried at the Rock of Cashel
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 wereyoung. 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.
Patrick Freyne: 12 reasons why it hasn’t always been cool to be Irish - including Murder, She Wrote and Batman 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.
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.
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