Farewell to a friend

I disagree with President Michael D Higgins on a number of issues, but I found myself completely in agreement with him when he recently told Tommie Tiernan that he found himself going to too many funerals of good friends.

I was at one such today – down in Newtownbutler, on the NEI side of the border but only just. The funeral was that of Larry Murphy, whom Face Book readers may remember until recently engaging in hand-to-hand combat with Donal Kennedy, usually over the goodness or evil of Russia. Repeatedly, Larry met Donal’s eloquence with iron-tight chapter and verse links supporting his argument.

Larry was my year –and  in the same class, until I got demoted – in St Columb’s College in Derry. He was one of three brothers boarding in the College – his brothers Kieran and Sean are both dead for some years now. It was unsettling to see Larry’s features reflected in the faces of the men and women doing readings or leading prayers during the Mass.

The priest in his homily confessed to not having known Larry during his life, but he did a good job of knitting together the fragments of a life lived almost completely in the Fermanagh village of Newtownbutler. Having like myself served his six-year sentence in St Colditz, Larry went to St Joseph’s Training College for teachers in Belfast. Once qualified, he hurried back to Newtownbutler for the rest of his life.

He was hugely well-read: he xould produce an apt quotation to fit into any conversation or argument. He was a keen sportsman. In St Colditz, he played centre-back to the team I played on, and we won the coveted Senior League (all in-house: St Colditz wasn’t renowned for its outward gaze in those days). The priest in his homily made just two mistakes: he suggested that Larry attended St Colditz at the same time as Nobel Prize winners Seamus Heaney and John Hume. He was right about Heaney, wrong about Hume, who left the year we entered (no necessary connection between the two events). The second priestly mistake was his failure to point out Larry’s prowess on our League-winning team of 1960, which got us a day-trip on a bus to Portrush to try out the Amusements, ogle any girls who were anywhere to be seen, and the day-long opportunity to stuff food into our faces, pausing only to damage our lungs inhaling drafts of tobacco smoke. Ah, sweet bird of youth.

Larry taught all his life in a secondary school in Enniskillen. When I asked him about spending a lifetime on the same stomping ground, he said he figured it was either the worst or the best decision he’d ever made, he couldn’t decide which.

He was a fierce Gaelic footballer, an intense golfer, a fearless runner and a tireless cyclist. It was while on a biking holiday in Spain that he became ill and died.

After the coffin had been lowered  this morning and a decade of the rosary led by the priest, we stood in the steady Fermanagh rain;  in the silence, the funeral bell began to toll.   Ask not for whom the bell tolls.

Slán abhaile, Larry.