Philip Casey
Born: June 27th, 1950
Died February 4th, 2018
It was no surprise to anyone who knew the poet and novelist Philip Casey, who died on February 4th in St Francis Hospice, Blanchardstown, that he bore his final illness with customary stoicism and dignity. Illness and pain were ingrained in Casey’s life since being diagnosed, aged two, with cancer in his groin. The infant poet-to-be survived, thanks to intensive radium treatment in the Royal Northern Hospital in London, though this treatment had serious medical repercussions for him throughout his life.
Philip’s parents were Irish immigrants in London. Like most of their generation they needed to emigrate to seek work. At 17 his father, Pat, arrived in that blitzed city in 1943 from a farm in Co Laois. His mother, Ann moved to London from Co Sligo in 1944: a trainee nurse tending to wounded servicemen in Plaistow Hospital. They married on St Patrick’s Day, 1949. Philip was born in in Hackney in June 1950.
His childhood memories of those bombed streets appear in his second novel, The Water Star (Picador 1999): a brilliant evocation of London's diversity, prejudice and rebirth in the aftermath of war and the experience of migrant Irish seeking work there. In 1957 his parents returned to Ireland, eventually purchasing a farm in Hollyfort, near Gorey in Co Wexford. Hollyfort's landscape inspired Casey's early poetry, although, as a farmer's son, he possessed no sentimentality about rural life. A severe kick from an animal left him laid up for weeks, aged 14, eagerly reading Ulysses after his mother found a second-hand copy in Gorey. After-effects of his early radium treatment necessitated him spending three years in the mid-1960s in Cappagh Orthopaedic Hospital, undergoing several operations. Here he learned guitar, becoming life-long friends with another patient, Paddy Doyle, whose bestselling memoir, The God Squad, shook Ireland after Casey persuaded Raven Arts Press to publish it in 1988.
Active life
Casey refused to allow health issues to interfere with an active life, working in Dublin, writing poetry and enthusiastically supporting the fledgling Gorey Arts Festival from its foundation in 1971. In 1975 he moved to Barcelona for three years where he witnessed street celebrations at Franco's death. After he returned to Ireland his debut collection of poems appeared from Raven Arts Press in 1980, who published two subsequent collections, After Thunder (1985) and The Year of the Knife (1991). His poems made him, in Paula Meehan's words, "one of the most beloved of contemporary poets". Theo Dorgan called him "unswerving in his commitment to his craft and art, a gifted lyricist, an incisive and surefooted novelist, a humanist in the deepest sense".
In 1983 further complications from his childhood radium treatment resulted in his leg being amputated below the knee. Problems persisted, requiring a further amputation in 1993: his family feared they would lose him. Even amid constant infections and phantom pain, Casey never lost his mischievous humour. When a kindly well-intentioned nun in the Mater Hospital suggested to him that he was suffering for the sins of the world, he replied “No, sister, I’m suffering for the sins I’ll commit as soon as I get back out into the world.”
Exuberant welcome
His election to Aosdána in 1989 allowed him to live in a small house on Dublin's quays where numerous friends from Ireland and abroad always received an exuberant welcome. His attention turned to fiction: his debut novel, The Fabulists (Lilliput, 1984) receiving the inaugural Kerry/Listowel Writers' Week Novel of the Year Award, praised by Colm Tóibín as "a stunningly truthful and perfectly pitched novel".
It was followed by The Water Star and then The Fisher Child (2001), which deftly conjured locations like the 1798 Rising in Wexford and Irish-owned slave plantations of Montserrat. His next project displayed his selfless generosity of spirit: he set up the free online resource "Irish Writers Online", giving readers concise biographical information about every Irish writer, from the most famous to the virtually unknown.
Rarely mentioning his health problems, he was a beloved figure at launches in Dublin, radiating kindliness on a pair of colourful crutches. His deep passion for social justice made him an equally familiar figure on marches and demonstrations. In 2015 poets Dermot Bolger and Katie Donovan organised a Mansion House celebration to mark Casey's 65th birthday and the publication of his Selected Poems, Tried and Sentenced. The huge attendance testified to the love of his peers, who in Theo Dorgan's words, "admired him for his stoic endurance of a cruel fate, his quick and often hilarious wit, his deftness with words, his vast compassion for the afflicted."
He bore his final illness with stoic courage, typically hiding his pain behind a smile. Sebastian Barry spoke for many when saying “Maybe Philip was just one of those angels that we apparently don’t believe in”. He is survived by his brothers, Peter and John, and his sister, Karina.