TDs mourn for former Justice Minister

Finance Minister Brian Cowen sat drinking a pint of Guinness today inside the door of MJ Henry’s pub, where Sean Doherty and his Fianna Fáil cumann had plotted so many of their election victories.

Across the road lay the church in Cootehall, Co Roscommon, which Doherty had visited every day for mass in his final years.

The former Justice Minister might have been disappointed to learn that nothing had landed on the helipad which had been specially marked out on a local field, but he would have been more than pleased with the presence of Cowen and a host of other current Fianna Fáil ministers.

There were also the ‘good people’ of Cootehall in County Roscommon who turned out in numbers to mark his passing.

“He was involved in everything. It was worse than the Pope, the impact of the grief here for him,” said Doreen Henry, an elderly friend.

Doherty revelled in the cut and thrust of local politics, with one of his favourite sayings being “I know people better than they know themselves.”

He was involved in securing funds for road building, marinas, houses and local tourism projects such as the Famine museum in Strokestown, the mining museum in Arigna and the O’Carolan festival in Keadue.

Another friend, Andy Oates, who delivered the graveside oration at the picturesque Ardcarne cemetery, said he was also instrumental in securing the tax incentives which led to a building boom in the region.

“He was one joyful character, he always looked on the bright side. I don’t think we’ll see that type of politician again,” he said.

However, his daughter Rachel was elected to Roscommon County Council and there were approving murmurs from listeners after she delivered her oration at her father’s funeral mass.

“As good as himself. That’s a speech like him,” said one mourner outside the church.

But there was a sense that the tolling of the funeral bells sounded the end of an era when local politicians dominated the areas they lived in, and garnered respect for it.

Amid all the tributes, the darker side of Doherty’s character was not a topic of conversation. But it is for his involvement in the 1982 phone tapping scandal and other political controversies that he will be remembered.

The funeral mourners heard that Doherty would take secrets to the grave with him and it may never be fully known what involvement he had in a scandal, which saw RUC detain a witness who was due to give evidence against a relation in a drink driving case.

Who knows what former Taoiseach Charlie Haughey, who sacrificed Doherty on the altar of political expediency when the phone tapping scandal broke, will make of the celebrant Fr Brian Conlon’s contention that he would be welcomed into ‘Heaven’s ville’ by his former colleague?

Doherty’s religious fervour in his final years led him to champion the cause of Christina Gallaher, the woman who founded the House of Prayer on Achill Island. The obituary notice placed by his family in the newspapers requested: “No flowers. Donations to the House of Prayer.”

He was buried in Ardcarne Cemetery in Cootehall, which dates back to the Famine, and has a memorial sculpture noting that 110 people were buried there in the first 50 days of 1847.

More than a million punts has been spent to restore its pathways and headstones and of course, it was Sean Doherty who was involved in securing much of it.