Tommie Gorman loved funerals. He took funeral attendance “to a level of high art. I can imagine him coming home from this and saying jeez, it was great, full to the rafters.
Kieran and Sinéad were incredible on the music. Fr Christy was on fire.” Joe O’Gorman was speaking about his father at Gorman’s funeral Mass in Our Lady Star of the Sea Church, at Ransboro, Co Sligo on Saturday afternoon.
“Tommie loved funerals because his lifeblood was connection. There was nobody he couldn’t connect with, even if they were a Shamrock Rovers fan.” His father “loved people, and he told his friend Martin McGuinness that generosity was the greatest weapon.
” He would say “that the most admired presidents and prime ministers are just people like the rest of us at the end of the day. But he would also say the same about people that were despised. He would find your humanity, even if you tried to hide it from him, and he would love you for that.
” Gorman’s “respect for politicians as people that just wanted to do good” was, Joe thought, cemented by an experience in 1994 when his father was first diagnosed with cancer and Padraig Flynn [then European commissioner for social affairs] told Tommie to “get the best treatment he could, and that he could pay for anything as long as he had the money”. His father did not need to call on that offer, even if he could. His father “loved Sligo to its roots, and “used to get giddy crossing the Curlews”.
He “always ref.
