Fr Pat Moore - great connector of people and exuberant heart of the community

Journalist Karen Rice remembers her much-loved friend

FATHER Patrick Moore - priest, healer, writer, linguist, proud Kerry man, matchmaker, great connector of people and exuberant heart of the community.

I can still vividly remember the spring morning I first met Pat Moore. I heard him before I saw him. His powerful voice landed on the doorstep before he did. ‘Let’s take a schpin around the land of your ancestors,’ he said in his Asdee brogue. Off we flew in the Pat Mobile, passing through Tullahinell, Asdee, Littor, Beale, Ballybunion and Listowel. Time flew and conversation flowed. It did not matter that we were complete strangers, we shared a commonality about life and people in it. We talked family, Kerry, literature, history, politics, journalism, life in general, its absurdities, and Knockanore mountain in particular.

The name Knockanore sounded effortlessly romantic to this Londoner as did his invite to climb Knockanore mountain for a dawn mass on Easter Sunday. We laughed a lot. He had the kind of laugh that shook his body. ‘Do you know who that is?’ he asked as we passed a statue of former US president Bill Clinton swinging a golf club on Ballybunion main street. He proclaimed Billy slick with his stick in Ballybee.

We laughed some more. He dropped me back to my uncle’s house, and as he drove off he leaned out of the car window and boomed: ‘Miss you already,’ ‘isn’t that ridiculous, that’s what the Americans say.’ His howling laughter was left hanging in the air as he disappeared into the mist rising from the foot of Knockanore mountain.

That was the start of a 15-year-friendship that enriched my life and touched the lives of many members of my family including my daughter’s. There was no formality or convention about him, just boundless enthusiasm.

In an age when people are increasingly isolated behind computer screens, he yanked people out of inertia and made it real, he dragged people back into the community, and retaught them the vastly underrated social skills of one-on-one and group interaction. He broke down barriers and stereotypes. He opened doors. Only Pat Moore could have imagined and actioned a plan to have a live crib at his church in Duagh. There’s no doubting that a church is an unusual place to find donkeys, goats, rabbits and hens milling around the baby Jesus.

But the idea was inspired and drew scores of people from parishes well beyond Duagh. He gave the magic of Christmas and the birth of Christ a meaning that no sermon from the pulpit could equal. He took delight in the fact that so many children who don’t get to see real animals, could now see, feed and touch them and better understand the meaning of Christmas.

He worked hard to help further people’s ambitions be they personal, literary, romantic or otherwise. But once he’d made the introduction, he would disappear into the Kerry hillside, hard at work for the good of peo- ple and the community at large.

He helped write, produce and acted in many plays that aired at St John’s Theatre in Listowel. He held local support groups and put his boundless enthusiasm and drive behind the establishment of a sports and leisure centre in Duagh.

Many times he welcomed me into his home at the parish house in Duagh. Without fail, he’d have some unusual piece of news or food or an interesting artefact from another part of the world to discuss. Pat loved company and chewing the fat. His way with words made me cry when he gave my baby daughter a blessing soon after her birth.

He spoke about the continuity of the circle of life and blessed all the footsteps she’d take in life. I remember how he placed his healing hands on the head of my dearest cousin whose heart was broken following the death of her much loved father.

Nothing was ever too much trouble for Pat Moore. He knew the value of giving and spending time with people.

And so it was that he reaped the rewards of his benevolence when he suddenly fell ill with oesophageal cancer in 2015. His devastated family and legions of friends and parishioners rallied to his side, giving him emotional and practical support, while taking comfort from the words he continued to write despite suffering two years of illness.

Diagnosed with cancer when he was just 57, we clung onto his musings, knowing rather than accepting that he was moving ever closer to the closing chapters of his life.

It is a cruel irony that the very man who breathed life into the community, the great communicator, should have been robbed of that immeasurable gift in the last months of his life.

For this most vibrant of men found it difficult to breathe. He found talking and meeting people most tiring. On St Stephen’s Day 2015, he wrote: ‘Though I only spoke for less than two minutes [in Mass], the tiredness was overcome by the warmth of the love I felt.’

But the disease could not dry his ink. He lyrically marvelled at the beauty of spring, the furze in the hedgerow, the ribbon of moonlight on boreens on Christmas eve, the rural beauty of his much loved Littor strand, the ash tree in his mother Kathleen’s garden, sunsets, and the flocks of South African geese who migrated to his shores.

It is a mark of his faith, that he compared getting cancer to ‘being discovered by suffering.’

“To live is to change,” he wrote on 21 January 2016. “So often I have only valued the pleasant/ happy times of my life,’ he wrote. “But too much sunshine makes a desert. Life includes suffering and if I don’t include it, I live out of fear and not faith.”

It is fair to say that Pat Moore renewed faith in the Catholic Church at a time when numbers are dwindling.

He renewed that faith as much in life as in death. His parishioners flocked to Mass every week to hear him speak, their much loved parish priest and friend.

On Thursday, May 4, hundreds of people showed their loyalty again when they filled St Mary’s Church in Asdee to say their last goodbyes to this most loveable and unique of men. School children gave him a guard of honour as he was driven to Aghavallen in Ballylongford to be laid to rest beside beloved parents Peg and Mick.

There are few places in North Kerry that I’d be able to visit without thinking of Pat Moore. More often than not they are memories that make me laugh.

I am thankful that he embraced me into a Kerry I felt disinherited from growing up as the child of Irish immigrants in London. For him, I was no outsider but someone who’d simply come home.

It is comforting to know that on the evening before he died, he was laughing and joking with his good friend Donie, and said he would see him again.

Pat’s good friend John O’Donoghue remarked that ‘one of the biggest sins is the unlived life.’ There can be no doubt that Pat Moore lived life to the full. He gave so much to so many people in such a short lifetime. He was a one off.

We are so privileged to still have time on our side, time that Pat was deprived of. Take a leaf from his book: Welcome people no matter who they are, be inclusive, be giving and helpful, break down barriers, be fearless, laugh a lot. You can still hear his laugh can’t you? Turn a bad day into a good one with a smile from a stranger.

The late Fr Pat Moore