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Renowned writer Eugene McCabe defined himself by his “love of nature,” as heard Saturday at his funeral mass in Clones, Co Monaghan.
McCabe, a playwright and one of Ireland’s leading contemporary writers, has died at the age of 90 in recent days.
Due to coronavirus limits on gatherings, his funeral at the Chapel of the Sacred Heart, Clones, was restricted to close family and friends, but the service was streamed online.
Born in Glasgow in 1930, he grew up near Border in Clones, Co Monaghan on the family farm. He would work as a farmer until 1966, at which point he focused full time on writing.
In delivering the funeral mass, Monsignor Richard Mohan said it was on the farm that McCabe “developed a knowledge and love for the land.”
“The Frontier and its effects on the personality and lives of people became in one way or another themes of his writings,” Bishop Mohan told those gathered.
“His love of literature, or writing, was matched only by his love of nature,” he said. The writer was always “the boss” on the farm, he said.
McCabe was “a man who enjoyed good conversation” and was remembered “as a family man,” he heard the mass.
The writer “did not hide” his pleasure in living to be 90, or as he would say “twenty-five,” said Mgr. Mohan.
He is survived by his wife Margot, his daughter Ruth, his three children Marcus, Patrick and Stephen, and his sister Margaret.
In reaction to the news of his death earlier this week, President Michael D. Higgins described McCabe as a writer who “was able to grasp the complexity of different points of view, and particularly those faced with bigotry. and fundamentalism ”.
McCabe made a name for himself as a playwright with his 1964 play The King of the Castle, which offended the Catholic group League of Decency.
A severe critic of violent extremism and sectarianism, influenced by a lifetime of living on the border, he wrote a forceful scripted trilogy about RTÉ’s problems in the early 1970s: Cancer, Inheritance, and Siege.
His 1992 novel Death and Nightingales, described by author Colm Tóibín as “one of the great Irish masterpieces of the century”, was recently adapted for television by the BBC.
In addition to writing a series of highly acclaimed short story collections, most recently Heaven Lies about Us (2005), he also wrote for children and the non-fiction work Shadows from the Pale: Portrait of an Irish Town (1996).
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