Farewell to a West of Ireland dad

Irish Current Affairs Blog of the Year 2018

If there is one thing my family learned over the past nine months or so, it’s the amazing public health system we have out in our communities here in Ireland.

A team of nurses, carers, and staff from our local pharmacy were on call every day of the week to give my father as comfortable a life as possible and to fulfil his wish of dying in his own home.

Thanks to our public health care professionals, and the support of a loving family, my dad had the most peaceful death anyone could ever hope for. He had spent an entire Sunday surrounded by people who cared for him, before deciding to leave this world just before 1am on a Monday morning.

Last August, we saw the other side of the Irish health service when, at 93 years of age, he was forced to spend 48 hours on a trolley in an overcrowded Emergency Department after sustaining a fall in the family home.

Never a fan of hospitals, all Micheal Tierney wanted was to get home to his own place. And, thanks to a rota devised by his family, the support of care workers who called twice a day, and an amazing Public Health Nurse, we managed to let him realise his dream of staying in the home and the neighbourhood he adored.

Our public hospitals may be in crisis, but the care provided to our most vulnerable in their own homes and communities is second to none.

Patients lying on trolleys in an Irish public hospital

My dad showed the true spirit of a fighting Irishman.

He lived far longer than the few weeks he was given back in January and even defied the doctors to be still with us when his beloved son, Micheal Junior, flew in from New York 48 hours before he passed away.

Family meant everything to my dad and it was the love of his family which drove him on, confounding the nurses and doctors with his determination and will to live over the past few weeks and months.

After he had been told never to climb the stairs, my sister came into the house one day a few months ago to find him frantically cycling on a gym bike he had installed in an upstairs bedroom. On another day recently he went upstairs to “sort out the bills” because our mother “knew nothing about them”!

His generation, born in the first few years of an independent Ireland, were made of stern stuff. Most of his aunts and uncles had emigrated to the United States in the early part of the 20th century, because of the grinding poverty in Co Galway at the time, and he used to recall trying to pinch bread from the priests in his boarding school in the 1940s.

It was hard for him to see his strength go, to have to get people to put him to bed at night, but amazingly he became firm friends with some of his carers and could be heard laughing and joking with them as they helped him get to bed at night.

How amazing it was for his adult children to see him befriend carers from Malaysia, the Philippines, Holland, or Mayo, after his initial reluctance to even allow them into his home!

Dad with my sister, Mura, at a wedding in Spain in 2006

In the West of Ireland, in particular, we tend to do funerals and dying with great dignity and compassion.

We spent three hours shaking hands as literally hundreds of people made the effort to get to the Funeral Home. Such a tribute to a Civil Engineer, almost three decades on from his retirement from the local authority, would not be deemed unusual in this part of the world.

An amazing priest, Father Martin Downey, brought great peace and comfort to the family home when he made three house calls in the last few weeks of his life, as it began to dawn on my dad that his race was run.

My father only stopped jogging at 84 years of age, after embracing the fitness craze of the 1980s, and the medics were astounded by both his physical stamina and determination to live for as long as possible.

The staff at our local chemist in Galway City made the family feel that our father was the most important man in the world and a gentleman – they would repeatedly offer to call down with medicines, even giving us their mobile phone numbers if we ever needed them when the shop was closed at 3 or 4am.

That kind of personalised service would be unthinkable in many parts of the world.

Showing determination at University College Hospital Galway (UCHG)

And the neighbours rallied around over the past few weeks of his life, repeatedly calling in with cakes or ready-cooked meals. It was impossible not to shed a tear when they formed a Guard of Honour outside his home for his final journey.

His last day on earth was a perfect Sunday in a West of Ireland household.  His adult children did not feel guilty about leaving his bed side to watch a championship hurling game between Galway and Wexford on television, because that’s exactly what Micheal would have wanted.

Indeed, his beloved grandchildren, who gave Micheal so much pleasure in his later years, were dispatched to give him regular updates from the game every five minutes or so.

His six year old grandson, Mateo, would tell him “Ganga, it’s Ireland ten points, Waterford five” (It didn’t seem to matter that it was actually Galway against Wexford!) and granddaughter Sofia would report back that his pulse had settled every time Galway scored.

Like many Irish families, we grew up loving Sunday dinners and GAA games on television during the summer months.

Growing up in tough times, education was very important to my Dad. He might have seemed to be obsessed with education when we were teenagers in the 1980s, but – like many West of Ireland people of his generation – he saw it as a way out of poverty.

So many people from his area and generation were forced to emigrate in search of new lives that he and his friends wanted as many opportunities as possible for their children. They knew all about the heartbreak of people being forced to leave their homeland against their will.

These days, of course, we are connected by technology and the cousins in New Jersey or California don’t seem to live so far away any more.

He gave his children a life-long love of travelling since we used to go camping every Summer on the West coast of France in the 1980s, where he met some amazing life-long friends from throughout Ireland. Before that, virtually nobody he knew could afford to go abroad and our family holidays were spent, often in pouring rain, in Donegal.

He also gave us a love of nature. In Galway we are blessed to live beside Connemara, the Burren, and the wild Atlantic Ocean, and he loved to swim in the chilly waters of Galway Bay.

He has given all of us a love of the outdoors, an appreciation for healthy living, and a sense of justice and fairness which ensures that, like many Irish people, we always seem to root for the oppressed or the underdogs.

The extended Tierney clan assembled for his Requiem Mass

As children in the 1970s, we were thrilled when he allowed us to get up at 3am to watch the Mohammad Ali versus Joe Frazier fights as small kids in the 1970s.

Like virtually every West of Ireland family, America and Americans were always close to his heart. His own father, Martin, had spent five years working as a tram conductor in St Louis, Missouri, a century ago and used to joke that he wished he’d never come home!

There was a lot of heartbreak involved in emigration in those days – none of dad’s uncles or aunts ever made the journey home – but he got great joy in rekindling friendships with the New Jersey first cousins when transatlantic travel became affordable for ordinary Irish and American people.

Ireland is not a perfect country by any means, but the outpouring of affection, love and compassion which surrounds the death of an elderly Irish person after a long illness shows that that we do live life the way it should be lived, when it comes to family, community, and respect for the elderly here in the West of Ireland.

“May he Rest in Peace”

In the last few weeks of my father's life, my family received wonderful support from the Irish Cancer Society which allowed him to stay in his own home. You can find out more here

--  * Ciaran Tierney won the Irish Current Affairs and Politics Blog of the Year award at the Tramline, Dublin, in October 2018. Find him on Facebook  or Twitter here. Visit his website here - CiaranTierney.com. A former newspaper journalist, he is seeking new opportunities in a digital world.

The gathering of the Tribe

My website

When I took voluntary redundancy from my local newspaper almost a year ago, my head was full of plans to cut loose again and travel the world.

Having enjoyed the best year of my life far from the “safe harbour” in 2010, when I took a 12 month career break, my mind was buzzing with potential projects in far-off, sunnier climes. Another winter in Galway was definitely not part of my plans.

But sometimes fate works in mysterious ways and health complications – I picked up the MRSA bug in my local public hospital – put paid to my dreams of a radical change. 

The Galway players line up at Croke Park

Instead of volunteering in Nicaragua, guiding scuba divers in Thailand, or teaching English in Spain, I was confined to the safe harbour for seven months as a team of wonderful public health nurses set about healing my wound.

I had too much time to think, but I also began to appreciate the gentle beauty which us natives can often take for granted in the West of Ireland.

Not for nothing was my home town voted the “friendliest city on earth” just last week. But I must confess that, for much of my life, I was too busy or too preoccupied by perceived problems or injustices to revel in the delights of the people around me.

A scuba diving instructor in Egypt once told me that the best thing about Ireland was the people, when I complained about returning home to another wet and windy winter in the City of the Tribes. Sabry had never been to my country, but he had met enough Irish people through his job to appreciate the friendliness, easy-going nature, and hospitality of the people.

My long illness brought on some unwanted anxiety and uncertainty, but it also helped me to appreciate the simple things. Like the people in the clinic’s waiting room, who would share tales about their lives. Many of them had returned home after years spent working in England. Or the nurses, who went out of their way to accommodate me with early appointments when I had to reschedule during a digital marketing course.

Sometimes it feels as though there is a deep sadness in the West of Ireland, brought about by melancholic weather and the generations of people who have been forced to move overseas in search of better lives.

But the sense of community, the sense of place, is something to be revelled in; the way people will pause for a chat on the street or spend hours interacting with strangers in pubs is something we should never take for granted, because you don’t find that in many parts of the world.

On an emotional weekend in Dublin, I got to really appreciate my tribe. Galway, the Tribesmen, had reached the All-Ireland hurling final and I had friends and family home from the UK, Spain, New York, and even Australia.

We dared not dream of winning a first All-Ireland title in 27 years against the raging hot favourites, but we didn't want to miss the event just in case ... When we saw how muted the Kilkenny celebrations were, it was painful to imagine how wonderful the party would have been had the underdogs defied the odds.

There is nothing like an All-Ireland weekend to heighten the emotions, as we recalled past battles, defeats and victories, and the sheer heartbreak of following a team who have come close so often only to fall at the final hurdle.

The Galway hurlers break our hearts, but let nobody say that Galway people are not passionate about the game.

In the capital's pubs before and after the game, we swapped tales about games we had witnessed (or where we’d watched them) down through the years.

I was a young student squatting in London in 1988, the last time Galway won the All-Ireland. I was having too much fun to come home for the final and never thought I’d wait at least 27 years to see them win again. I have been to all six finals they’ve lost since then.

In 1989, I was on the Hill with my younger brother for the semi-final clash with Tipperary when there was a poisonous atmosphere in the air after the ‘Tony Keady Affair’. A year later, he watched the final in the Bronx, on the day Joe Cooney produced a master class but still ended up on the losing side against the Rebels.

In 1993, after we'd lost to Kilkenny, an old man on the train home said he’d never see Galway win another All-Ireland. It’s the kind of fatalism we share with Mayo football fans and I knew exactly what he meant. Defeatism and negativity can be traits of those of us who grew up among the stones, the drizzle, and windswept fields of Connacht.

It took us eight years to get back to Croke Park in September and Tipperary ruined our plans in 2001. Four years later it was Cork’s turn and Kilkenny, the game’s dominant modern force, blew our dreams to smithereens in 2012 and again this year.

Celebrating the semi-final win over Tipperary

To add to the torture, our team even managed a draw against the best team in history three years ago. We could have, and should have, beaten them to end the famine that afternoon.

When the hurlers beat Tipperary in last month’s semi-final, I suddenly felt pangs of regret that I was no longer involved in writing about them for the newspaper. There’s a giddy excitement about the build-up to an All-Ireland final – unless you’re from Kilkenny, where it’s probably just another annual event like Christmas or St Patrick’s Day.

On Saturday, my sister took the ferry home from London. She refused to miss the final. It cost her a fortune she could hardly afford, but as she headed back on Monday morning she said it was all so worthwhile.

From the singing in the pubs, to the chats with fans of all ages who had made the trip to Croke Park, there is something truly special about the All-Ireland weekend.

The way the supporters of the opposing teams mix and share their passion for the game is unmatched in any sport. There were over 82,000 people in Croke Park with no need for the kind of segregation I’ve seen following Liverpool to Champions League, UEFA, and FA Cup finals.

My cousin flew in from London, too, to see his team get beaten yet again. He doesn’t even remember his team winning an All-Ireland, but he had to be there, as did the old musician friend home from the Canary Islands.

We lost, but we celebrated all that is good about being Irish – and the West of Ireland in particular – in the crowded bars along Dorset Street on Sunday night.

These are the things that dreams are made of, even if our dreams were shattered yet again last weekend.

Galway people love their hurling and we should remember that there are passionate fans in places like Laois and Carlow who would love to see their team take part in just one All-Ireland final at a captivated Croke Park.

I’m so glad that the team got a rousing reception when they returned home. 

They reminded this cynic about so many of the good things associated with life in the West of Ireland, whether it's pucking a ball against a gable wall or spending hours talking about the game we love.

I could have been lying in the Nicaraguan or Spanish sunshine on Sunday, starting a new life, but it just felt right to be in the middle of my crazy, passionate, wounded Tribe, as we learned to cope with the pain of defeat once again. Sure, that's life!