‘In verse, he could be funny or sad, but always wise’
DAN was indispensable as a poet, storyteller, raconteur, songwriter, adjudicator, showman and lover and champion of all things Irish.
He served for many years as a leader of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann in Kerry and Munster and spent a number of years as Chair of Writers' Week.
His poetry has been anthologised in collections of Irish poetry, has been broadcast on RTE and local radio and has been published extensively in journals and magazines. He is one of that select band known collectively as ‘the Listowel writers’.
But Dan would add that he is first and foremost a Knockanure man and in this context can be described along with Paddy Drury and his brother Michael (’Ruck’), Willie ‘the Poet’ Finucane, John Looney and Bernie O’connor as a Knockanure writer and, to paraphrase Yeats, they are ‘no petty people’.
Dan published his last book on Friday, November 18, 2011. It was entitled ‘A Kerryman’s Limericks’. Dan attended that launch in the Seanchaí Centre in Listowel. It was to be his last public engagement.
Dan was a pious man - not for him the rude, the risqué or the Rabelaisian. Like the vast body of his poetry, his limericks treat of religion, education, love, friendship, temperance, money, music, matrimony, football, life and death.
He wrote almost entirely in formal verse, in metre and rhyme. In this he was greatly influenced by his favourite poet and distant kinsman, Thomas Moore whose father hailed from Moyvane.
Verse of this kind works only if it appears effortless. Dan, an old hand at verse-making, always handled the intricacies of formal verse with great dexterity. He could be funny or sad, but he was always wise. I leave the last word to Dan himself.”
‘He's bright as a breeze Sitting down at his ease And rhymes flowing out of his head’.
Dan, old friend, ar dheis Dé go raibh do anam uasal.