Opinionirish pop culture
The Irish Goodbye – From wakes and funeral sandwiches to local radio death notices and RIP.ie. Ireland’s relationship with death is curious, communal and sometimes hilarious.
Páraic Kerrigan
What do Daniel O’Donnell, pint baby, iodine tablets, Irish reality television, moral panics around sex, Nadine Coyle’s missing passport, housewives of the year, bachelor festivals and the Alive-O religion programme have in common? They all tell the story of Ireland through the pop culture that has shaped us. Páraic Kerrigan, of The Traitors Ireland series, has a new book, Pop Culchie, looking at the quirks of Irish life at that time. Here, he tackles the tricky subject of death…
GROWING UP IRISH, death was just part of the itinerary. Like Mass on Sundays or rain in summer, death and its rituals were part of the background noise of Irish life. As a child, it wasn’t unusual to walk into someone’s sitting room and be greeted, not by tea or biscuits, but by a body laid out in the middle. One summer in Limerick, while staying with my aunt, I was brought to three wakes in a single day. Not that these were grim affairs; on the contrary, they were packed, as if the deceased had sold out three gigs in a row. The mood at these wakes wasn’t mournful either. People chatted, laughed and passed sandwiches around.
Despite the parade of corpses and the ambient smell of incense, I didn’t really get death. Death felt more like a polite absence than a devastating rupture. My grandmother died when I was eight and even then, it was explained to me gently that she had simply gone into another room, and we wouldn’t be seeing her for a long time. This explanation was comforting, if a little vague, as I imagined my grandmother in some never-ending spare bedroom somewhere in Heaven, and wondered if she had a television there.
My true education in the horrors of death didn’t come from a funeral or from the passing of a loved one, however, but from Xtra-vision, Ireland’s video-rental store that was the holy grail of Friday evenings and the closest thing Ireland had to US giant, Blockbuster. When he came home from work on Fridays, my dad would take me to rent a video and one evening, I picked out a VHS copy of My Girl, expecting some light entertainment. This was to be my fatal error, as a number of hours later, death was going to become all too real.
In short, My Girl is a 1991 coming-of-age film set in small-town Pennsylvania in the summer of 1972, where 11-year-old Vada Sultenfuss, played by Anna Chlumsky, lives with her dad, who runs a funeral parlour out of their house. (Why not introduce your child to death literally from home?) Understandably, Vada develops a bit of a death obsession. She befriends Thomas J. Sennet, played by Macaulay Culkin, an unpopular boy who has a number of allergies. As their friendship develops, Vada and Thomas share their first kiss together while in the woods, where Thomas J. accidentally knocks down a beehive nest, resulting in Vada losing her dead mother’s mood ring. Later Thomas J. returns to retrieve her ring but is killed by the bees due to his allergies.
Thomas J.’s death floored me. I had expected a feel-good watch but instead found myself blindsided. When Vada is told that Thomas J. has died, something in me cracked. Watching his body being wheeled into the funeral parlour in a zipped-up bag made me realise that I actually had some feelings. The subsequent funeral scene is one of the most haunting memories of my childhood. Vada, struggling to comprehend the finality of it all, approaches his open casket and pleads with him to go tree climbing. Then she notices he’s not wearing his glasses. In her grief, she sobs, ‘Put his glasses on. He can’t see without his glasses.’ That moment broke me completely.
What was it about this film that changed how I understood death? Maybe it was the realisation that children could die, which meant, I suppose, that I, too, could die. Or maybe it was the fact that friendship, even the purest kind, wasn’t immune to loss. For Vada to lose her best friend so suddenly and for us to witness it through her eyes, was nothing short of traumatic. And so, at the age of eight, I learned two things: death was real, and My Girl was most definitely not a Friday-night comedy.
And yet, it was after watching My Girl, an American story, that I started thinking more deeply about how we, in Ireland, deal with death. I re-watched the film many years later and remembered that while I had been to plenty of wakes as a child, this on-screen one just ‘hit different’, as the kids would say today. But while the film introduced me to the emotional weight of death, I found comfort in the fact that the Irish tend to do death pretty well.
Beauty of the Irish wake
My mother has always said that when she dies, we’d better make absolutely sure she’s dead before we bury her. While possibly somewhat neurotic on my mother’s behalf, this sentiment is actually the reasoning behind that most sacred of Irish death rituals: the wake. The wake has been a central part of Ireland’s death culture for generations and has been a crucial exercise in ensuring that the deceased did not wake up and that no one got buried alive accidentally. Before embalming and heart monitors, the wake was less a send-off and more of a 24-hour ‘Are you sure?’ party, with loved ones keeping an eye on the corpse, just in case it stretched or coughed.
Waking the dead consists of the body of the deceased being laid out in the family home in order for relatives, friends and neighbours to pay their final respects and for the corpse to be keened or lamented, so that the spirit might pass safely to the next world. While mourning is generally sorrowful, the Irish wake also encompasses music, food, alcohol and the sharing of stories and, often, laughter, which I suppose goes some way towards trying to overcome a fear of death.
The Irish wake is very much a communal affair, but it also serves as a masterclass in culinary generosity. For the grieving family, they are not expected to cook for the duration of the waking period. From the moment word gets out, neighbours, cousins and people you haven’t seen since your First Communion descend upon the house bearing trays of lasagne, pots of curry, mountains of triangle sandwiches (or more colloquially known as funeral sandwiches) and enough baked goods for the house to serve as a pop-up café. No one knows exactly who’s in charge of the tea, but there’s always someone on the kettle. In addition to this there is also plenty of drink flowing to steadily soften the blow of the dearly departed, as we mourn with sponge cake in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other.
Before the wake begins, the body of the deceased is laid out in a room, usually dressed in their Sunday best by the local undertaker. Their hands tend to be gently folded around a set of rosary beads. The protocol, generally, involves joining the procession of mourners into the room, standing by the body for a moment of reflection (or polite panic), before being shepherded into the kitchen for the community-supplied food.
A central fixture of any wake is, of course, the rosary. Several decades are said aloud in unison over the body, often slow, rhythmic and eternal in length. For seasoned wake-goers, the true skill lies in timing, which involves getting in, paying your respects, grabbing a sandwich and quietly vanishing before the rosary kicks off. For the less experienced, it’s easy to get caught in the prayer trap, wedged between devout relatives and unable to escape without committing full-blown social heresy. Then there are the die-hards, whom we might call the rosary veterans, who wouldn’t dream of skipping it.
For them, the rosary is the headliner, the spiritual encore, the proper send-off, whereas everyone else just hopes it’s a short one. The rosary has been re-imagined for the modern-day with the new rosary card, a prayer tool that has been made to fit into your wallet or purse. Instead of traditional rosary beads, there are 10 circular finger holes punched into the card, which comes in a variety of colours, from pastel pink to a more traditional white. It’s practical, portable and makes the rosary accessible to everyone. An Irish wake essential of the future.
The wake is merely the opening act of the five-part performance that is the full Irish funeral experience. Act two is the removal to the church (a ritual which is dying out in cities), where the body is transported from the house (or funeral home) to the church, usually in a long, slow-moving cortège of cars, with many walking behind the hearse, causing minor traffic disruptions and major guilt for anyone caught overtaking it. This is then followed by the third part, which is the funeral Mass, with the subsequent burial and the grand finale of the post-funeral refreshments.
The death notice
While the five-act funeral ritual is the emotional heart of Irish mourning, the true logistical backbone of death in Ireland is the death notice. Death notices originally appeared in local and national newspapers, serving as a vital way to keep track of both the living and the dead in an Ireland where communication infrastructures were far less connected than they are today.
Then came the golden age of local radio and with it, the sacred ritual of the morning death announcements. My local radio station, KFM, was a mainstay of this communication infrastructure. Every morning, at 8 a.m., a moment of silence was shushed upon us in the house while my mother turned the radio volume up. The ever-consistent announcer would begin with: ‘KFM has been informed of the following deaths’, before further instructions of ‘family flowers only’, ‘reposing at McWey’s funeral home’ with the itinerary, from the wake to the burial, being provided at the end. On some occasions there would be interjections from my mother when one of the dead was familiar to her: ‘Oh, she was a young 80 all the same’, or, ‘I’ll try and get to the house for that’.
Death notices on local radio were crucial to community connection and a daily ritual that helped people stay in touch. While it might seem strange, even a little morbid, it was rooted in something deeply respectful, which was an instinct to honour the dead, no matter how loosely, or vaguely you might have known them. If you didn’t know the deceased at all, but knew someone ‘belonging to them’, showing up to offer support was simply the done thing.
While once confined to the back pages of newspapers and the hushed tones of morning radio, death notices have undergone a full-blown technological glow-up. The modernisation and popularisation of death has arrived courtesy of the internet. More specifically, through Ireland’s most unexpectedly addictive website: RIP.ie. A national treasure and cultural phenomenon, RIP.ie is where mourning meets search engine.
Founded in 2005 by siblings Jay and Dympna Coleman, the site was born out of two very modern problems. Jay, the digital pragmatist, figured that if you could google anything, why not death? ‘Every time I want to find something out, I google it,’ he said to The Irish Independent. ‘So why shouldn’t you be able to do the same with this?’ And Dympna, having missed the funeral of a close friend’s father while living abroad, realised there was a glaring gap for the Irish diaspora, who often had no way of keeping up with who had passed away back home unless it came via a letter or a phone call.
RIP.ie offered something simple, albeit revolutionary, which was a digital home for death notices. Upon launching the site, Jay optimistically hoped that, ‘in time, RIP.ie will become people’s first point of reference for end-of-life matters’. A bold mission statement but one that has turned out to be eerily accurate. From those heady, dial-up days of the mid-2000s, neither Jay nor Dympna could have predicted that their modest website would become a full-blown cultural institution.
RIP.ie became the go-to destination for death, the Facebook of the afterlife, and an unlikely but beloved pillar of Irish digital life. The result ended up becoming a one-stop shop for the dearly departed, lovingly bookmarked by aunties and funeral-goers across the country. By 2022, RIP.ie was pulling in more than 250,000 visitors a day and clocking up a staggering 50 million page views a month. As of 2021, an RTÉ news report noted that the platform had amassed profits of €1.42 million, which is not bad for a website about death.
This rose to €1.69 million in 2023. RIP.ie didn’t just corner the market on death notices, it became the market, all while turning a tidy profit and cementing itself as one of Ireland’s most unexpected tech success stories. In 2022, The Sunday Times observed that, ‘the website RIP.ie has usurped newspapers’ death-notice columns and even local radio broadcasts as the go-to location for the answer to the most important question in traditional Irish households.’ That question being, of course, ‘Who’s after dying?’
The Irish Goodbye
In Ireland, it seems death occupies a distinctive position within popular culture as a visible, communal and often mediated part of everyday life.
Unlike in many Western contexts, where death is increasingly privatised and removed from public view, Irish cultural practices see death integrated into varying corners of our shared popular culture, to the extent that a website about death becomes a significant cultural touchstone and part of the fabric of Irish pop culture and spawns its own cultural industry of memes and even fan-created merchandise.
Put simply, when it comes to death, Ireland tends to do it well. While the death of Thomas J. in My Girl may have shattered something in my childhood self, being brought along to wakes and regularly seeing the deceased laid out in their Sunday best taught me to accept death in a way that was both strange and oddly reassuring.
It’s not that I’m eagerly awaiting the day I meet death like an old friend, but I take some comfort in knowing that, when the time comes, there will be rituals and structures in place to help my loved ones carry the weight of that loss.
Páraic Kerrigan is a bestselling author, researcher and Assistant Professor at UCD. He was also a star in the smash hit second season of The Traitors Ireland, where he was selected as a traitor. His previous book, Reeling in the Queers, was shortlisted for an Irish Book Award in 2024. His new book, Pop Culchie, is out today.