Walking to Ringsend for Paul Durcan’s funeral on Thursday, I noticed a crowd of locals gathered on the city side of the humpbacked bridge that crosses the Dodder just before the village.
They were waiting for the cortege, a man told me, to continue an old tradition whereby – even if they don’t know the deceased - Ringsenders help the bereaved family carry the remains over the river to the church.
As I took up a position on the far side to get a picture, a woman emerged from somewhere in funeral finery (and a bright red hat). “Are they going to carry Paul over the bridge?” she asked.
They are, I told her, pointing to where the hearse that had just arrived. “Oh gosh,” he said, hurrying off to join in.
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Sure enough, from there to St Patrick’s Church, the cortege became a local production, as the undertakers stood aside temporarily, and the villagers took over as pall bearers and funeral directors.
Not all those involved were dressed for the occasion. One leading participant had a baseball hat and shorts. But, the informality of the attire somehow only added to the poignancy.
The idea of crossing rivers to eternity is a staple of mythology. In James Joyce’s Ulysses, where Paddy Dignam made the journey in the opposite direction to Durcan, the four rivers of Hades become the Dodder, the Grand Canal, the Liffey, and the Royal Canal, in that order.
But when I asked Father Ivan Tonge of St Patrick’s about it afterwards, he thought the Ringsend tradition might have its origins in a more practical consideration.
The Dodder is notoriously prone to flooding on its last stretches and must have washed many early bridges away: “Locals would sometimes have had to help carry coffins across.”
The custom may also, however, be tied up with the unusual traditions of dockers, a profession to which Ringsend has long been central.
It used to be the case – and maybe it still happens sometimes – that a docker’s coffin was carried by a circuitous route involving the homes of all his friends, at each of which the door knocker would be lifted and dropped one last time, to say goodbye.
More mysteriously (according to a 1953 report in The Irish Press), dockers’ coffins were also carried “between the two gasometers”: industrial landmarks of the area.
Whatever the bridge-carrying ceremony’s origins, like many old habits, it might have ended in 2020 with the pandemic. Instead, that only increased the determination of Ringsenders like David “Smasher” Kemple to keep it alive.
“The Covid ruined a lot of things, and we didn’t want it to ruin everything.” he said in a short recent film for the Irish Hospice Foundation. He soon found himself performing the rite for an old friend, whose death first alerted him to the threat of Covid: “He was a fit man going down to Galway that Friday,” recalled Kemple, sadly. “Then a couple of weeks later, we were carrying Larry over the bridge.”
Mind you, Ringsenders tend to have a robust sense of humour, and “Smasher” is no exception. He also jokes in the film that he’d like to hold his own wake before he dies, “to see what it’s like”.
In which vein, it struck me on Thursday that it was a pity Durcan – one of the funnier poets Ireland has ever produced - wasn’t alive to enjoy his own funeral.
Among the poems read during the service was one inspired by the election of the pope in 2013, in which he compares Ringsend to the back streets of Buenos Aires and describes many of the landmarks of the funeral route as if they were stations of the cross:
“The Barber Shop, Tesco Express, HQ Dry Cleaners, the three public houses – The Yacht, The Oarsman, Sally’s Return – The Bridge Café, the pharmacy, Ladbrokes bookmakers.” He would surely have got another poem from his last trip into the village.
The pallbearers do special requests on occasion. In an interview with the Dublin Inquirer newspaper in 2020, another regular participant Eoin Dunne recalled the funeral of a man who had spent his life working as a match-day steward in nearby Lansdowne Road, a stadium visible from the bridge.
On his final journey, as demanded, the coffin carriers did an about turn and bowed the departed in gratitude to the scene of so many pay days.
But comedy always vies with solemnity in the Ringsend tradition. Dunne also told the Inquirer about an occasion when the deceased was (a) a former scrap metal dealer and (b) very heavy.
As the carriers struggled under the coffin, Dunne recalled: “One of the lads was saying, ‘I think he has all the bleeding copper in it’.”
Then there was the time they overdid their enthusiasm for the tradition, stopping a hearse with three limousines behind it at the bottom of the bridge. They immediately launched into the routine of organising each other to carry the coffin into Ringsend, until the driver of the hearse intervened.
“Lads, lads stop,” he said (allegedly): “This funeral is going to f**king Bray.”
