‘Ronnie was himself and people were drawn to him’

RONNIE DREW never tried to make friends, yet he was always surrounded by friendship, his son Phelim said of the father he shared with a second family of musicians and singers.

“He was himself and people were drawn to him,” Phelim explained of the natural charm that infused the gravel voice and dry humour that were the earthy Dubliner’s trademarks.

Celebrant, Fr Denis Quinn, could bear testament to that, recalling how he met Ronnie for the first time when he came to a Christmas party for senior citizens organised by city centre gardaí. At the Garda station they stood aside as two young female detectives determinedly marched a large uncooperative man up the steps. “Ronnie looked over to me and said: ‘How would you like to be married to one of them? They’d teach you manners.’”

But if he wasn’t inclined to turn choirboy for a priest, he wasn’t about to play the celebrity either.

“My dad enjoyed life to the full and he enjoyed quality in everything — in conversation, in food, in cigars, in wine, in dress, but he did not have a huge amount of respect for money,” said Phelim.

He recalled how, when a friend reading a story in a Sunday newspaper about Michael Flatley earning a million a week, asked what Ronnie would do if he earned that kind of money, his father quipped without hesitation: “I’d work for two weeks and then stop.”

Similar stories were relayed from the pulpit and pews throughout the Mass and Phelim thanked the Greystones parish for “indulging” the family on their difficult day and for censoring neither the scale of the funeral nor the content of the ceremony.

“I don’t think it would be Dad’s funeral without there being a slight edge,” he said.

Bishop Eamon Walsh, representing Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin, picked up on the theme, hailing Fr Quinn for successfully “walking the tightrope”, noting that sometimes clergy and families fought over ownership of the deceased at times of bereavement.

He went further, if somewhat cryptically, to issue what appeared to be an invitation to more secular involvement in the Church. “The love and compassion and the huge feeling for the person who got a hard hand in life that just oozed through the gravelly voice of Ronnie Drew in a way, elevated the words of songs to become a sacred mantra,” he said.

“If only we could work more with the artists, with the musicians and the singers. Together we have so much to offer.”