I'm afraid I have bad news.Oh dear.Billy - Billy Pope - had a heart attack today.Good God, no!I'm sorry to say he's gone, he's died.
Words became meaningless. Sudden death is always a shock. In Billy's case it struck home especially, because he not only exuded vitality in the moment but looked always round the corner to the next move that would benefit the many causes he espoused.
Billy was a Dub - and in particular, and proudly, a Northsider. The day job was in insurance until his retirement in 1992 and it was this which first brought him to Galway City in 1967.
He lived in Renmore, where he became involved in a variety of community undertakings and demonstrated his considerable gift for identifying those who had a contribution to make - even if they themselves didn't know it before meeting Billy! He moved to Cork in 1974 before returning to live in Galway in 1981.
It was when he moved to Knocknacarra that year that he stepped up several gears in his responses to a variety of community needs.
Shortly after his move, the Galway County Association for the Mentally Handicapped opened the first of four group homes in the area. After organising a garden party at the home to raise funds and welcome the new residents, Billy became increasingly involved with the association. He set up a local branch in Knocknacarra and in due course became a member of the association's board of directors and chairman of its finance committee, a position he held until his death.
In Billy's work in mental handicap he combined in a rare way the broad approach of a visionary with the personal touch in door-to-door collections and visiting residents in the homes.
As a man of strong moral principles, Billy demonstrated in many spheres of his life that action should accompany beliefs - nowhere more than in his commitment as a layman to the life of his church in the community. Again he combined the broad picture, as in the Herculean work he did in the reduction of the Knocnacarra parish debt, with the minutiae of daily support in organising readers and stewards, or lodging collection money. If it needed to be done, Billy was there to do it.
Perhaps his most enduring legacy is to the older citizens, not just in Knocknacarra but in the West of Ireland. In 1996 he set up KARA, the Knocknacarra Active Retirement Association, and in 1999 the Western Regional Council of Active Retirement Associations (ARAs).
In these short years the one ARA has become 33 all over the West, and growing. More and more older people are learning that by getting together they can not only bring new life to their own years but contribute also to their neighbours and their communities.
In Active Retirement Billy showed one of his great skills and strengths - his ability to bring people with him, to empower them, and in this way to build for the future. One of his special pleasures in KARA was the writing group and he wrote beautifully nostalgic pieces about his childhood in Dublin.
Above all, Billy's life revolved around Marie and their family. He was devoted and dedicated to Marie, immensely proud of his children and gloried in each of his nine grandchildren. In the roundness of his life he was a man to marvel at. What he touched he enhanced - and not for personal gain but for his neighbour in the broadest sense.
We who knew him were privileged. Though his death has narrowed our horizons for now, his spirit will still permeate the fields he ploughed.
P.McD.
