Beloved Richard ‘Dick’ Gough was laid to rest on a spring day in the shadow of the ‘Rock’

There was snow falling in Nenagh last Friday afternoon as the remains of Richard ‘Dick’ Gough made a final journey through Holycross, to Boherlahan and on to the Rock of Cashel for burial. Very few these days get to be buried in the ‘Rock’. The previous burial was in September last year and before that it was back in 2018. The exact number buried there, and the exact number that still may be alive that have rights to be buried there, is still unknown.

At the ‘Rock’ a crowd gathered. His wife Betty spoke of the wonderful 60 years they spent together and said he never forgot Boherlahan where his spent his youth. After, ‘Danny Boy’ filled the air led by his son Desmond on microphone.
Dick Gough loved life. At his funeral mass in Nenagh his son Julian, a renowned author, singer and poet delivered a moving eulogy:

“Hi Dad, I don’t what to say. You were so alive all your life, and somehow you never grew old. The last time I met you, you were still young. You still moved with all the energy of a young man, even though your knees were going and you’d had cataract surgery, and your naps in front of the telly were getting longer.

“Even though I knew you were 89, and nobody lasts forever. When you got out of the chair you were fully alive. You were a young man startled to be in an old body. Which is why your death has come as a such a shock. Surely there’s a law that says you have to grow old first, Dad,” he said.

“You got the end you wanted. You always said you wanted to go out like a light. Click. You didn't want to hang around and you have been telling us for years not to be sad when your gone, that you weren’t worried about it so we shouldn’t be. That you’d be perfectly happy back with your mother and grandmothe up on the rock in sight of the pub you grew up in, in Ballydine. And you said, ‘look out for a bird flying over the rock looking around. That will be me.’  Ok dad, I will.

“Dad was born at a different time in a different world. His mother Mary Crummy wasn’t married to his father Dick Gough at the time although they did marry later. So his mum went to England to have him. 

“At that time most unmarried Irish women did not get to keep their child but she loved him and she wanted him and she hung onto him. He was always enormously, tremendously grateful for that because he knew his life could have gone very differently. 

“I think the angriest I ever saw him was after he had seen the film Philomena about a child taken away from his mother,” he said, adding that those “lost children were his spiritual brothers and sisters”.

“When World War Two broke out he was evacuated from Walton-on-the-Naze which was getting bombed, back to his grandmother’s pub in Ballydine. He was ok about that because he had been promised a pony. His father, who was also living in England, met his mother at the train station and gave dad a saddle. Dads mother had a locked elbow, a stiff arm, because they had left it too long in the cast when she had broken her arm as a child and it had set.

“She put the saddle on the arm, she put dad on the saddle and she carried him back to Ireland. And from that point on, he basically brought himself up. His grandmother and his aunt were busy running the pub, he had no parents around and so he was kind of free to become fully himself in a way that was quite rare at the time. And I think still is. 

“And he did a great job of it! From about the age of ten he would just head off across the fields and call into every house in the parish for a chat. And they would all offer him a cup or tea or a scone or a slice of cake and he would always say yes and never let on how many he had that day. Does that sound familiar?

“When he was 18 he went to Belfast and joined the RAF and asked to be sent overseas. When they asked him where he wanted to go he said ‘how far away have you got?’

“No disrespect to Tipperary, but if he was going to see the world he wanted to see a lot of it. So he went by ship through the Suez Canal to Singapore. He spent three wonderful years there as a fireman,” Julian said.  He continued telling the adventure filled life story of his father.

“I think those years abroad were part of what made him one of the most open minded and least judgemental people and unprejudiced people I ever met,” he said. When he returned to England, Dick met Betty - also from Tipperary originally -  at the Gresham Ballroom in Highgate. They got married and remained so for 60 years. The couple had two children and moved back to Tipperary in 1973 where Dick got a job as Second County Fire Officer for Tipperary North Riding. He helped modernise the service in the county afterwards. 

“He has saved a lot of lives and he has seen a lot of lives lost,” said Julian speaking about his dad who wrote a report about every incident within seven brigades the area in his time.

“And yet he was the jolliest man I ever met,” continued Julian.  “The only hint I had that he was deeply affected by all this was that sometimes he would come home from work and mum would make dad this special dinner,” he said, adding that years later he discovered those were days his father had attended fatal fires. His joy with being alive in the world ‘was earned’ Julian said. Dick loved life and was with the local Choral Society and loved acting with the Nenagh Players. He was a pioneer but loved music in a pub.  “You just can’t sum him up in a few minutes and I won’t try,” he said. “He was my first, my best and my oldest friend,” he said.

Richard (Dick) Gough passed away on February 24th 2024, aged 89. He is sadly missed by his loving wife Elizabeth (Betty), (nee Grogan) and his sons Desmond and Julian, grandchildren, extended family and friends.