The Late Willie Ryan On Saturday, June 11th Matt Dunne, Jim McLoughney and I had an experience that was at once highly satisfying and yet profoundly sad and sobering. We attended the Requiem Mass in Murroe, Co. Limerick, Parish Church for Willie Ryan and were at the graveside at his remains were buried in Abington Cemetery, a short distance from the house of his birth. With Matt, Jim, myself and the other 17 members of the panel-as it would be called now - Willie had done months of training with us to get Harty Cup medals with Thurles CBS in 1951. A quiet, stocky, tenacious sort, he was a Pallotine College student who attended the CBS to get the Leaving Cert that year. It was only fitting that, 54 years later, the three of us would turn up for his Mass and burial. It was a beautiful sunny June day with the lush greenery of the Tipp-Limerick border countryside at its best. It was my first visit. The village was spotless and the newly decorated church, with its stained glass windows, looked terrific. Undertaker John Meehan choreographed the proceedings with a finesse born of generations that went back to horse-drawn hearses. Frs Tom Ryan PP and Tom Hearne CC celebrated the Mass and performed the funeral rites with ease and tact, assisted by altar assistants among whom one young fellow held the male fort. The music of Karen Franklin a daughter of one of Willie's cousins and the singing of Michael Ryan no doubt my male bias helped me to think that there is something uniquely fitting about the male voice on such occasions- added immensely to sense of all pervading sense of dignity. Mentally I sang the Salve Regina hymn that I would have liked to sing out loud as I did at my brother Paul's Mass. For over 1,000 years Christians have sung it as one of their members died for further joy enhancement. Though it was a funeral it was not mournful.There was no grieving immediate relatives. Willie was the last but one she is in Florida, ending her days with Alzheimers - of the family of two boys and four girls. Many decades ago all had left for England, America and Africa. The family graveyard plot, with its space for 12 occupants, had the remains of the parents only since the 1970s. Willie hadn't been home since he left for England around 50 years ago. His many cousins and the handful who knew him were happy that his body had come home to rest among his own. Matt and I got special satisfaction form the occasion, as we had played a part in that homecoming. Four years ago we had looked for Willie when he was the only one of the 1951 panel we could not contact for the 50 years after get together. With the help of Seamus Ryan no relation but recently returned to Thurles from Dublin, and a native of the Murroe area Matt made contact with Willie's relatives and got a address in Manchester. I wrote to him but got no response. A fortnight or so ago a phone call from most helpful people in Manchester asked me to help in locating Willie's relatives. A search of the neat little flat where took suddenly ill and died on the way to hospital had found no will, and a local burial was on the cards. The search had, however, found my letter and phone number. It had gone to an old address and had been redirected to the new one, probably too late for Willie to join us for the get-together. But he had kept it, and a copy of the Tipperary Star article that referred to his being the missing person. I got in touch with Matt and he and Seamus got in touch with Murroe cousin Paddy Foley who took it from there. It was a privilege to have been able to play a part in Willie's homecoming. Our feelings of satisfaction were tinged with sadness. We would have preferred if he had been with us four years ago. We thought of his past 50 or so years of which we know little. He was all too typical of those of the 1950s who gave the priesthood a try and were then left on their own, ill prepared in career terms - but maybe not in more important ways - to make their way through life. The signs are that Willie managed well. We were left also with the sobering thought that the remaining 15 of that 1951 panel are moving to the top of queue for entering the state that is already the lot of the departed six-Captain Paddy Croke, Gerry O'Grady, Gerry Wall, Vincent Shalvey, Dick Quinn and Willie. We are now in our 70s. It is comforting and also challenging to believe, as our Catholicism asks us to believe, that we can do things to enhance their joy and they can do things to enhance ours, here and hereafter. Courtesy of the Tipperary Star 20th August 2005 An Appreciation by Joe Foyle Tweet

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