We truly need poetry in power

THIS May 12 we waked Patrick Galvin, one of our great national poets, in Connolly Hall in Cork.

His remains had been brought there from his home in Douglas in a horse-drawn hearse. Patrick was the first man to ever be waked in Cork’s Connolly Hall, and this on the very day that James Connolly was killed in 1916; we knew that Paddy would have been honoured.

When we finally said our goodbyes to Paddy at the Island Crematorium in Cork Harbour, Michael D Higgins was invited to read one of Paddy’s poems. It was a poem called “Letter To The Editor” about a self-important man who, upon dying, realises that society is not celebrating him as his ego had mislead him to think it would. The poem is a letter from the dead man to the editor of a newspaper’s letters page and it is really one of the funniest of Paddy’s poems.