Serenity marks the timely passing of a man of more letters than St Paul

IT WAS late, for a taking to the church, but still pewter-bright with the promise of rain.

Although most of the streets around Donnybrook Church had been traffic-coned into clearways the night before, the entrances to many of them were now blocked off by gardaí in threes, talking quietly to each other.

Mourners found parking spaces further away than a normal funeral would require, having arrived extra early in anticipation of the crowds. In at the corner where the footpath meets the wall ran multi-coloured tubing linking RTÉ’s outside broadcast unit and generator to light rigs and cameras inside the church.

The visitors’ book was in a porch corner, under a display of artwork by first communicants illustrating their prayers for their big day. One of them promised God that the child involved would always help any other child who was hurt, which momentarily suggested that the Holy Communion ceremony might be more combative than it used to be.

In the centre aisle of the church, Government ushers wearing small brass badges recognised arriving ministers and Opposition TDs, former ambassadors and present-day TV presenters, bringing them to designated seats where old friends and acquaintances nodded to each other.

The fat round sepia lamps within the church were overwhelmed by RTÉ arc- lights affixed to metal rigs attached to the pillars around the altar. It was all bright white light and so much of it that no shadows fell. A funeral in a church brighter than day, without shadows.

One of the altar boys came up the aisle in a cream-coloured robe with a pointy hood, ironed flat behind his shoulders, clearly never to be dragged up over his shining hair. He had the loose end of the red cord that ran around the waist of the robe in one hand, lashing it around at such speed it became a circle of pink with a whispering buzz to it.

Everywhere, a susurration of contented comment about how sad it was, the paradox resident in the subsequent comments, which carried neither shock nor the usual references to untimely death. The consensus seemed to be that this was that rare happening, a timely death. “The mind as fine as ever it was...” “Still writing until two weeks ago...” “Something right about the timing of it.”

Judges arrived, looking like judges, and found themselves squeezed so tightly into pews that the forced intimacy was irresistibly reminiscent of John D Sheridan’s description of Sunday Mass 50 years ago, where worshippers were so tightly packed that “if the man in the middle took out his hankie the man at the end fell off”.

The people in our pew formed a silent conspiracy to repel boarders, sitting knees apart to create the illusion of being more tightly packed than was the reality.

One man stashed his umbrella under the kneeler in front of him with the muttered hope he wouldn’t have to unfurl it afterwards, because it was a big golf umbrella bedecked with the logo of a troubled bank.

In response, a woman leaned across her husband and quoted Garrett saying, on some recent radio programme, that he didn’t ever comment about banking because he didn’t understand it. “And I do wish other people who don’t understand it either would just shut up,” she whispered in a passable imitation of the dead man’s elided diction. Wasn’t that just so Garret, someone confirmed, reminding those around him of how strange it was that Dr FitzGerald would always skip a syllable in the word “constituency.” Mouths moved silently as those registering the comment tried to recall just how he had always done it: “Constitncy.” Like text language, someone suggested. This created a quiet surge of mutual contagion as everybody within hearing checked that their phones had been switched off. This was not the church service to be disrupted and diminished by a random ring tone (nor was it).

One man, white hair curling over a neck thickened by youthful rugby, murmured that because he lived outside Dublin, he had left his home halfway through the rugby match. The man beside him had walked from just around the corner and could tell him the second half had been the greatest turnaround ever. As he started to explain, the meandering organ music came to a conclusion and a sound like the softened drumming of a bodhrán took over at the rear of the church: the measured footsteps of soldiers carrying the coffin. Rendered anonymous by their uniforms, concentrated faces covered in beads of recent rain, shoulders darkened by damp, they passed in procession, following the purple-cloaked priest and two altar boys.

Then it was into the ritual, the sequenced liturgy of parting, with its brutal phrases like “the mortal remains” softened by solemnity, and the reading from one of St Paul’s letters.

Not even St Paul had published as many words as had Garret FitzGerald, but the two men had shared the unselfconscious certainty that what they wrote was more important than they were, Paul’s writings infused with the authority of the almighty, Garret’s with the authority of data and detail and analysis.

Members of the congregation of faiths other than Catholicism and non-believers bowed their heads in silence during the decade of the rosary, while Garret’s age-cohort, white hair shining under the television lights, slid into the murmured phrases familiar from childhood. Younger people managed the Hail Marys but were thrown by the Hail Holy Queen, bringing their hands up to cover their mouths to conceal the fact that they didn’t know the words.

Once the President and the Taoiseach had spoken with the chief mourners, the celebrant asked everybody else to use the centre aisle to approach the pews where the FitzGerald family sat, but within minutes, the instruction was forgotten as people took short cuts, generating the silent fury of those who obey the rules and see therein an affirmation of their own decency.

Outside, gardaí and army officers stood unprotected in the windy rain. For the rest, unfurled umbrellas created shelter for impromptu gatherings of clustered couples and individuals, some excusing themselves for not recognising others: “Sure, it’s younger you’re getting.”

They were not anecdotal about the man whose tricolour-draped coffin rested in the church behind them. There were no stories of great moments in his career or seminal statements made by him. Nor was there acute grief — more the generalised serenity of people remembering a time of shared discovery, a time when ideas rather than gossip were the currency of the moment, when the talk was of pluralism and liberalism rather than celebrity.

“Ah, Garret,” they said repeatedly.

They said his name as if it was a password to some inchoate common value system.

They said his name as if it had a significance beyond itself, as if it would recreate the best times of their lives.

The times for which they believed him to have been the catalyst, rendered irrevocably historic by his passing.