O’Connor hailed as ‘impartial, kind, a great man of learning’
Mourners gather to honour writer and journalist
WRITER, journalist and sportsman Ulick O’Connor, who would have been 91 today, has been compared with Cardinal John Henry Newman, who will be canonised a saint in Rome tomorrow.
“Ulick and Newman had much in common, both were pernickety, controversial and somewhat contrarian, and both loved words,” said Fr Patrick Ryan.
Fr Ryan was a friend who just happened to be in Dublin from his missionary work in Kenya and celebrated the funeral Mass along with another friend, Fr John Flavin, in the Church of the Three Patrons in Rathgar, Dublin, yesterday.
Actor Patrick Bergin, who gave the eulogy, said that he got to know O’Connor when he was performing in the play ‘Trinity of Two’. “We often shared a bottle of wine and I got the full range of his belligerence,” said the actor.
The play dealt with the relationship between Oscar Wilde and Edward Carson, who cross-examined him on behalf of the Marquess of Queensberry during the famous libel trial. But Bergin said he had never forgotten O’Connor telling him Carson, the Dublin-born leader of the Ulster Unionists, refused to prosecute Wilde for homosexuality – something O’Connor admired.
A wreath on the altar from Jim Gorry read “tread gently through the night and give Bobby Sands a hug”.
Chief mourners were his niece Mary Buckley and his friend and personal assistant of many years, Anna Harrison.
The attendance included Sinn Féin politicians Gerry Adams and Mary Lou McDonald, former Chief Justice Ronan Keane, artist Robert Ballagh, playwright Bernard Farrell, fellow biographer Charles Lysaght, actor Geraldine Plunkett, musician Donal Lunny, horse trainer Jim Bolger, painter Thomas Ryan, writers Ann Haverty, Cormac Figgis, Marina Guinness, Eamon Carr of Horselips, publican Dan McGrattan, Mannix Flynn and journalists Campbell Spray, Alan Steenson, Trevor White and Larissa Nolan.
Fr Ryan said O’Connor was “no respecter of persons, he targeted the top of society and the bottom of the heap, regardless of their social standing or station in life and if occasionally his voice came across as shrill it was because he was impartial.
“Yet he was kind, he was a great man of learning with a breadth of interests as wide as the sea and his literary output alone was prodigious.”
Gifts brought to the altar included his biography of Oliver St John Gogarty, the trophy he received as British and Irish Universities boxing champion in 1950, and a copy of the Sunday Independent newspaper.
Bergin finished by reading Yeats’ ‘The Song of the Wandering Aengus’ and the title of Dylan Thomas’ poem, ‘And death shall have no dominion’.