Gallows humour on the topic of Irish deaths

TV Watch with Dave O’Connell

It would appear that we Irish have a particular fascination with death and dead people – and a good funeral isn’t far behind a wedding in terms of the sense of occasion.

So it’s probably not that strange that Ardal O’Hanlon would choose to dig deep, so to speak, into this world of the dead and how we mourn them, for a one-off documentary entitled Guess Who’s Dead on RTE 1 last week.

And it starts with the death notices, where the language can take on whole new meanings.

So Joe Bloggs either died ‘peacefully or very peacefully’, or they have gone ‘suddenly but peacefully’ – which might suggest they didn’t know what hit them – but invariably they were ‘taken from us too soon’.

Depending on what the family actually thought, the deceased’s departure was either ‘regretted’ or ‘deeply regretted’ – and this wasn’t just a sign of affection, because every letter in the death notice for the newspaper carried a price, so deep regret came at a cost.

‘American papers please copy’ just mean that they were a few of the family in Boston; ‘house private’ means steer clear of looking for free drink and sandwiches; and ‘family flowers only’ is a request not to overpower the place with wilting lilies.

Donations to Croí meant he died of a heart attack.

This was a sort of whimsical look at death and dying, an approach that isn’t easy to pull off – so perhaps that’s what made the man who played Fr Dougal the best choice for the job.

In real life, it helps that Ardal O’Hanlon had grown up in the house of a politician – his father was Fianna Fáil Minister Rory O’Hanlon – which meant that funerals were part and parcel of everyday life.

His father went to every funeral around, a practice that still exists today, according to Clare TD Timmy Dooley. And the Fianna Fáil man was honest enough to admit that it’s not because you get a lot of kudos for turning up – but you’d be afraid of the fall-out if you didn’t.

Only in Ireland, according to Ardal, is news of someone’s death is a conversation starter – even more bizarre when it is a conversion normally prompted by the question ‘you’d never guess who’s dead’.

Only an undertaker or priest could hazard an educated guess at that, but the rest of us have the world of choice to pick from.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.