Recalling my father on Pentecost Sunday

Communication on Twitter, Facbook, blogs, emails, all happen at the press of an electronic key. They can be devastatingly dangerous. People post outrageous copy, at least it is all so possible.


This blog will be six years old next month. Over the years it has posted a variety of comment and views. It has attempted to stay away from personal comment. As a result of having worked in the newspaper trade one learns or at least tries to learn to avoid the use of ‘I’.

What follows is a break from the rule.

Sunday was the feast of Pentecost. At Mass in St Dominic’s Parish in Tallaght at the Children’s Mass I began the sermon explaining, especially to the children, that when I was their age lorries and trucks in Ireland had helpers on board.

I explained to them that I well remembered when helpers were phased out. On one occasion driving to my uncle’s farm near Galmoy on the Kilkenny Tipperary border we spotted a truck from Killeen Paper Mills with no helper. Dad worked with Killeen so he noticed there was no helper on the truck.

After Mass a man came up to me and asked me if I were Paddy Commane’s son. Over the previous weeks he had wondered if there was a link between me and ‘Paddy’ Commane.

He had worked with Dad in Killeen Paper Mills and then later in Smurfit Mills in Clonskeagh. He is now 79 and served his time under my father.

He told me that my father could make a lathe sing, could do anything with lathes that were almost unworkable, that he was a man who could do anything and did everything that anyone ever asked him.

“He was always smiling, the most gentle of men,” he said.

We were about to part and I called him back and asked him did he ever hear my father use a bad word. “Not only did I never hear your father use a bad or crude word but any time anyone did he would turn away his face,” he replied.

Where in God’s name did he get me?

I’m often asking what life is about, what’s the point to it all, God, all those questions. I have a brittle relationship with the institutional church. I’m not sure about anything.

To hear those words about my father after Mass on Pentecost Sunday made the best sense I have ever heard about the Holy Spirit. It also caused many many tears. Tears of great joy, tinged with sadness too. That always turns up, whatever happens.

In the afternoon I climbed Kippure in the Dublin Mountains, a world to which my father introduced me. About 30 minutes from the TV mast I checked the time. The watch I was wearing was presented to my Dad by the staff of Killeen Paper Mills in 1974. Paddy O'Keeffe, the man with whom I had earlier spoken, no doubt had contributed to that watch.