Eoghan Nolan, creator of the Glasnevin Cemetery ‘One Million Dubliners’ poster, has died

Eoghan Nolan, advertising copywriter, creative director and a lynchpin of Ireland's creative community, has died aged 63.

In a long career in the creative industries, Nolan was responsible for numerous high-profile ad campaigns, and had a particular love of radio.

Nolan won several awards for his work, including “98FM Ad of the Decade”, “Radio Ad of the Millennium” at the Kinsale Shark awards, and Best Copywriting 2012 from the National Newspapers of Ireland.

With designer Annie Atkins, he developed the "Dublin, A Breath of Fresh Air" campaign for Fáilte Ireland in 2015.

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Perhaps his best known work of recent years was Glasnevin Cemetery's "One Million Dubliners" poster, created with Tony Purcell, which made ingenious use of the surnames of those buried there to publicise the cemetery as a heritage and tourist destination.

Typical puns read “486 Watsons, 687 Sherlocks”, “125 Barbers, 11 Beards” and “28 Biggs, 3 Fellows, One Michael Collins”. The poster is still in wide circulation across Dublin and many people have bought copies.

Nolan was a creative director at McCann-Erickson Dublin, Irish International BBDO and Leo Burnett. He founded and ran agencies of his own: Think & Son and Brand Artillery. In recent years he also worked as a consultant with Accenture.

He served as director of the Institute of Advertising Practitioners in Ireland and the Institute of Creative Advertising and Design. He was a manager for Copyclear, an industry body that oversees the role of alcohol in advertising.

When his wife Niamh O’Flynn first met him, she says, she was struck that “he loved his job more than anyone I’d ever met”. He adored the collaborative nature of advertising, she says, and a creative process that could be both fun and effective. “It was like magic for him.”

A lynchpin of Dublin’s creative community in the 1980s, Nolan “brought many people together,” says his friend Brenda Rawn from Canada. “Tobin’s pub [now The Duke on Duke Street] was the meeting point for an incredible collection of people: the artists Richard Gorman, Darina Roche and Paula Nolan, the composer Roger Doyle, Johnny Ferguson and Neil Jordan [Brenda’s husband]. Eoghan kept that little tribe together.”

“He was a very witty man in conversation. He and I shared a flat in Earlsfort Terrace in the mid-1980s, and it was more like 1920s Paris with all these writers and artists and musicians and playwrights coming and going.”

Neil Jordan, too, speaks warmly of Nolan, noting his intellect: “When I first knew Eoghan years ago in Dublin I actually thought he was headed towards literature. He introduced me to writers like Julio Cortázar, Raymond Carver, who I think he named one of his sons after.”

Eoghan Nolan became ill suddenly in December with endocarditis, and died on Friday February 26th after some months in St Vincent’s Hospital. He is survived by his wife, Niamh, and three sons: Carver, Art and Macdara.