Ireland

Bruce Arnold’s funeral: ‘What a time we’ve been through, from John McCormack to Bambie Thug’

Mourners told how ‘multifaceted, tenacious’ journalist, who died aged 87, took a privacy case against the State which was ‘the final undoing of Charles Haughey’

The coffin of Bruce Arnold is carried by family members into St Paul’s Church, Glenageary, Co Dublin, on Monday. Photograph: Tom Honan/The Irish Times

Patsy McGarry
Mon May 13 2024 - 18:12

The late Bruce Arnold was a man of “very strong Christian faith which was at the very core of his being”, recalled Rev Gary Dowd, rector at St Paul’s Church, Glenageary, Co Dublin, on Monday. He was also “a loyal parishioner” who, before church services, invariably had questions on the lesson he was to read or on Church teaching related to current issues, Rev Dowd said. “So, I lived in constant fear of not being able to provide him with a satisfactory answer, but he was always gracious and kind,” he said.

Mr Arnold (87) died on May 2nd and his funeral took place at St Paul’s on Monday afternoon.

During the funeral service his grandchildren read the Louis MacNeice poem Dublin, with its lines: “This was never my town/ I was not born or bred/ Nor schooled here and she will not/ Have me alive or dead/ But yet she holds my mind ...”

Hugo Arnold said his father was “multifaceted, a tenacious journalist, a novelist, an art dealer” who “loved music and dancing art and literature ... but his first love was writing”. Bruce Arnold met his wife, Mavis (who died in 2017), at Trinity College Dublin, “someone who would bring the stability he craved, immense happiness and the friendship he also needed. They were a formidable team. Together they built a household, with a really strong sense of family,” said Hugo.

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Polly Arnold remembered her father as “an extraordinary man and a big character”. Their mother was “the perfect partner for Dad, loving, kind, highly intelligent, wise and patient”. There was that “very perilous time” in her father’s life when he was accused of being “anti-national and a British spy”.

“Not to be cowed by anyone, Dad held his head high and, with the equally brave and fearless Geraldine Kennedy, took the State to court for invasion of privacy. They won and the case was the final undoing of Charles Haughey,” she said.

Her father “really was one of a kind and his death marks the end of an era”, she said.

In a eulogy, journalist Mary Kenny, who recently celebrated her 80th birthday, said she, Mavis and Bruce and their contemporaries were “born into an era which still bore all the hallmarks of the Victorian age”.

“What a time we’ve been through, from John McCormack to Bambie Thug,” she said. There was the 1960s with its radical ideas, when “after Vatican II, a wave of warm ecumenism swept through this country, causing John Horgan to write in The Irish Times that there was so much newfound friendliness between Catholics and Protestants that in the west of Ireland there was some anxiety that there might not be enough Protestants to go around”.

[ Bruce Arnold, journalist and author, dies aged 87 ]

Bruce and Mavis Arnold were “manifestly good people and I was a bad person. But sometimes good people need a bad person to complement their goodness, just as bad people need the ideals of good people.” She felt Bruce Arnold “was incorruptible”, someone “for whom honesty was the most important principle”. He was also “the most uxorious [faithful to his wife] man I have ever known”.

President Michael D Higgins was represented by his aide-de-camp, Col Stephen Howard. Among the large attendance were journalists Vincent Browne, Kevin Myers, Martina Devlin, David Murphy, Sheila Wayman and Philip Molloy, as well as biographer Charles Lysaght, Independent Dublin city councillor Mannix Flynn, Barbara Fitzgerald and Caroline Sweetman.

Afterwards Mr Arnold was buried alongside his wife, Mavis, in the graveyard of St Anne’s Church at Knocknarea, Co Sligo.

Patsy McGarry

Patsy McGarry

Patsy McGarry is a contributor to The Irish Times

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