A year after her husband Gay Byrne’s death, the author knows everything is going to be alright
I meet Kathleen Watkins outside Crabby Joe’s seafood restaurant on the pier in Howth. It’s a blustery, bright afternoon and the air is full of the smells of freshly caught fish and the sounds of hungry seagulls. She is about to turn 86 – her birthday falls on October 17th.
I'm terrific one day and then I get a bang out of the blue and I was told to expect that. So once you know it can happen, you think well, okay Outside Crabby Joes, Watkins orders lunch for us, in the same efficient and helpful manner she has identified the photogenic trawler. Crab cakes and Dublin Bay prawns in garlic butter, she decides, with brown soda bread.“Maybe a few chips,” she tells the waiter, “and we’ll have a glass of wine, sure it won’t do us a bit of harm.”
“Your mind goes back to all sorts of things. Times in our life together. One outstanding thing was we were asked to switch on the Christmas lights at Omagh after the bombing. We went up there, it’s a big main street, and there’s this platform. We’re at the back of it, it was thronged with people and all the twinkling lights and Gay broke down. I mean he broke down. He sobbed, backstage. I couldn’t believe it.
She returns to Omagh again remembering a woman on the Late Late Show telling Byrne about losing her son in the bombing. It resonates for Watkins more deeply now. “I remember she kept saying ‘he’s gone, he’s gone’ and I’d never heard anybody saying it like that before… and now I know, because it’s a shocking thing and that’s what I’ve had. He’s gone. He’s gone.”
Since Byrne died, there have been three more family funerals; Watkins’s sister Clare lost her husband Desmond; Alison, a daughter of Byrne’s sister Mary and her husband David, died suddenly. Gay Byrne and Kathleen Watkins being helped through a crowd of about 300 people who surrounded the couple when they left the Church of the Nativity, Saggart, Co Dublin, after their wedding in June 1964. Photograph: Gordon Standing
She walks a lot now, more than when Byrne was alive. He would always be disappointed if she wasn’t walking enough. He’d say “‘Oh I give up on you’ … he desperately wanted me to get the enjoyment he did from walking. It let him get away from people and clear his head. He’d walk for three hours at weekends in Howth with his friend Gerry and at the end they’d sit at the wall of the summit shop and have a bar of chocolate each. A Bounty.
Gay Byrne with Kathleen Watkins, after he was conferred with the Honorary Freedom of the City, outside the Mansion House, in Dublin. Photograph: Eric Luke
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