Mourners bid farewell to 'woman of wit and grace'
The late journalist and author Nuala O’Faolain was a steadfast friend and a woman of wit, grace and humour, mourners at her funeral heard today.
In a moving eulogy, broadcaster and close friend Marian Finucane paid tribute to the 68-year-old writer, describing her as a great scholar with a brilliant mind.
Ms O’Faolain died on Friday after being diagnosed with cancer earlier this year.
Just weeks ago she talked of her terminal illness in a frank radio interview with Ms Finucane, for which she won widespread acclaim for her honesty in facing death.
Today, in bright sunshine, hundreds of people including writers, journalists and Ms O’Faolain’s former partner Nell McCafferty packed the Church of the Visitation in north Dublin for a simple service.
“(Nuala) was a woman of wit, of grace and humour, a brilliant mind and a steadfast friend,” Ms Finucane said.
“Nuala was a woman of great scholarship, medieval English, 19th century English in Oxford, and yet all of us know that her real gift was taking complex ideas and expressing them in the simplest of 20th and 21st century English in a way that was accessible to one and all.”
Ms O’Faolain had worked as a pioneering producer for RTE and BBC but was best known for her stark 1996 memoir, 'Are You Somebody?'.
She had also penned the novel 'My Dream of You' and a second memoir 'Almost There'.
She had been living in New York prior to her death – most recently commentating on the US presidential election race for RTE radio.
Speaking on RTE in early April she said she had shunned chemotherapy to spend her last days travelling with friends and talked about facing death.
“I had no idea, nor did she, of the profound and spiritual effect it would have on so many others,” Ms Finucane said of that now famous interview, which she added had touched thousands of people.
Referring to her own tragedy, the death of her daughter Sinead in 1990 of leukaemia, Ms Finucane said Ms O’Faolain, along with her then partner Ms McCafferty, offered her grieving family constant support.
“A very large part of my friendship with Nuala was when she was with Nell, and they were part of our extended family, and they would visit all the time.
“She (Nuala) talked to me the way others wouldn’t because they would be afraid I would cry and she would say ’sure cry away, and talk through it’.
“She was a steadfast friend.”
Giving a hint of the late writer’s complex personality. Ms Finucane talked of Ms O’Faolain’s at times solitary life as well as her desire for friendship and fear of being alone.
“She was insecure about all sorts of things to do with friendship and I cannot tell you the number of times she said ’you won’t abandon me, please tell me you won’t abandon me no matter how sour or bad tempered I get’. As if I could, or as if any of us indeed could?” Ms Finucane said.
Ms O’Faolain never married but had a 13-year relationship with Derry journalist Ms McCafferty, who joined family and friends – including author Colm Tóibín, Labour TD Michael D Higgins and Irish Times editor Geraldine Kennedy – at today’s Funeral Mass.
Taoiseach Brian Cowen was also represented by his aide-de-camp.
Educated at University College Dublin, University of Hull and Oxford University, Ms O’Faolain was one of Ireland’s best known writers and commentators.
Her father Tomas was a well-known Irish journalist who wrote the Dubliner’s Diary social column under the pen name Terry O’Sullivan for the Dublin Evening Press.
She was returning from a fitness class in February when she felt ill.
A doctor later informed her in a New York accident and emergency department that there were tumours in her brain.
Dozens of tributes were paid over the weekend on news of her death from both the worlds of politics and the arts.
