Friends remember Mary Cummins

She was "both deeply attractive and slightly alarming. You wanted to impress her . . . in the Pavilion on summer Sunday nights . . . the sergeant's daughter . . . forever dancing gloriously beyond our reach."

Dr Brendan Kennelly was recalling the Irish Times journalist Mary Cummins at a remembrance service at the weekend.

Dr Kennelly is from Ballylongford, Co Kerry, and Mary was from nearby Ballybunion. She died there last November, four days after attending her mother Sheila's funeral. She had been suffering from cancer.

"Memory is a powerful thing. It's a form of immortality. It keeps the past alive. Those we remember never die," Father Austin Flannery told the large gathering of family, friends, colleagues and admirers at the chapel on Dublin's quays.

He recalled how 29 years ago the late Donal Foley had given Mary her job at The Irish Times. "He sought out a new type of reporter, original, discursive, better educated, most especially women journalists," he said.

A colleague, Mary Holland, recalled the young nurse in London, her beauty and style, her strength, her voracious appetite for life, her great throaty laugh, and her moments of despair.

And Daisy, her daughter. "Daisy became her life's project." She read from an article Mary wrote on Daisy's 21st. The "oddball mother she had . . . the emptiness of [recent] Friday evenings . . . Now that Daisy's 21 I cannot go on saying I am 39."

Another colleague, Mary Maher, read from Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood . . . I took the one less travelled by/And that has made all the difference.

Among the attendance were Ms Daisy Cummins, Mr Liam Cummins, Ms Kitty Cummins, Mr Patrick Cummins, Ms Anne Cummins, Ms Roisin Cummins, Ms Sheila Cummins, Mr Peter Commane, Ms Frances Fitzgerald TD, Ms Monica Barnes TD, Ms Niamh Breathnach, Ms Bernie Malone, Ms Olive Braiden of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, Ms Maeve Donovan and Mr Eoin McVey of the Irish Times Ltd, Mr Pat McGoldrick, NUJ FOC at The Irish Times, and Mr John Horgan. The service was arranged by Mr Sean Hogan of The Irish Times.