This article is one of a series about people who have died with coronavirus in Ireland and among the diaspora. Read more at irishtimes.com/covid-19-lives-lost. If you would like a friend or family member included in the series, please email: liveslost@irishtimes.com.
Gerard Mulvaney 1961-2020
When Gerard Francis Mulvaney was a boy in the late '60s and early '70s he used to help his father with his morning milk round, racing from house to house, carefully placing glass bottles on the doorsteps of people living across Dublin 8. He was only a child but those early mornings he spent with his father taught him lessons he would carry with him throughout his life. It was on those rounds that he developed his "hard work ethic", says his daughter Ciara.
“Out of all the qualities he possessed, he was a man who worked hard and always gave 110 per cent to any job he had,” she adds.
Born on August 12th, 1961, Gerard was the baby of his family and had three older siblings. He worked first as a security man and then a delivery driver before joining a recycling business. “He would turn his hand to anything,” Ciara recalls.
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"He taught himself skills, building kitchens, putting floorboards down and really enjoyed his job working in IT Recycle in Clondalkin, " she says. "It allowed him to fix things that people would have thought were broken."
Before all that he met and married Catherine and together they had six children, moving out to Clondalkin where the family has lived for the past 23 years.
“He was a hard worker who ensured his family always had what they needed,” Ciara says, adding that Gerard always “supported and encouraged their passion for football in their childhood”.
As a teenager and into adulthood, Gerard followed Heffo’s Army – the Dublin football team that dominated Gaelic football in the 1970s. Another team in blue, from across the water, also caught his eyes as did one sporting famous green hoops and when he wasn’t cheering on the Dubs, he was shouting for either Manchester City or Celtic.
"Man City were his favourites but he loved football and he would love to sit down and watch a game no matter who was playing," Ciara says, adding that in the 1990s when the boys in green were hitting their peak, he travelled around Europe to cheer them on.
Simple things in life
He was, she says, “patient, kind and intelligent” and devoted to his family. He “appreciated the simple things in life, he valued hard work, loved listening to the radio and was fond of a cup of tea”.
He liked the odd "pint of stout" too and he loved westerns and could quote lines from Jim Carrey movies at the drop of a hat.
He followed the news closely and “adored Bloomberg and keeping in the loop with the news”. Gerard read this newspaper too, often describing it to his friends and family as “the only one with a good bit of reading in it”.
Ciara says on her last phone call with her father, “When he was in the hospital I asked if there was anything I could bring him and he said to get him a copy of The Irish Times – he loved it.”
He was, Ciara says simply, “a beautiful soul who was taken too soon. We feel like he is still in the hospital because we haven’t had a chance to grieve properly yet.”
Gerard Mulvaney died in Tallaght Hospital on March 28th after contracting Covid-19 while in the hospital being treated for an unrelated condition.
