FOR three days the coffin had lain on the balcony of his 11th floor flat in one of Ballymun's tower blocks while his friends and neighbours waked him with a vengeance.
Finally, yesterday afternoon it was time for Pat Tierney to say a final goodbye to a cruel world.
Before he hanged himself on his 39th birthday last week, Mr Tierney had drawn up elaborate plans for his own burial cremation, plenty of music and song, no priests.
These were followed to the letter yesterday in a joyful funeral which proceeded slowly from Ballymun to the crematorium in Glasnevin Cemetery. His coffin was carried first by six women and then, successively, by six men, a funeral car and a horse and carriage.
On top of the coffin lay a giant red ribbon, a reminder that Mr Tierney was an AIDS awareness campaigner, as well as suffering himself from the disease. Beside it was a Palestinian keffiyeh head scarf, the one he usually wore when reciting poetry his own or that of others in Grafton Street.
Mr Tierney was one of the dispossessed abandoned by his mother, his foster parents and, ultimately, by his country. In the US he was to meet his nemesis, in the form of the HIV virus, at the end of a contaminated needle during a brief flirtation with intravenous drugs.
The unhappy facts of his life neglect, abuse, sleeping rough, petty crime, emigration, infection were set down in an autobiography The Moon On My Back, in which the moon represents the past that threatens to flatten the fleeting pleasures of the present.
This is what ultimately happened last Thursday night, when Mr Tierney ended his life under a full moon in the grounds of Corpus Christ Church, near Ballymun.
Yesterday, however, a bright yellow sun hung over Glasnevin Cemetery as an eight piece percussion band noisily dispelled the ghosts of the past.
Inside the crematorium, friends, many disabled by tears, paid tribute to Pat and his many causes organiser of the first feis and St Patrick's Day parade in Phoenix, Arizona the Magdalene Laundry memorial Dubliners against the Royal Tour.
Mr Larry O'Toole, of Sinn Fein, said Mr Tierney was an Irish republican "People will remember him for his energy, his intuition, his brass neck when working on campaigns. Pat was the one who came up with the initiative and innovation to keep us going."
The mourners sang Molly Malone and Sonny as children from Ballymun, now writing poetry in the local Rhymers' Club set up by Mr Tierney, paid their own tributes. The Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, Mr Higgins, and the Minister for Social Welfare, Mr De Rossa, attended, as did TDs, Mr Joe Costello and Ms Roisin Shortall, and Mr John Gormley, of the Greens.
At 2 p.m. on Saturday afternoon Mr Tierney's friends will gather for a last time at the top of Grafton Street to spread some of his ashes in the place where he became a familiar face to so many Dubliners. The rest will go into the Liffey.
