Life

Seán Dunne at his desk in Scoil Lorcáin

Seán Dunne at his desk in Scoil Lorcáin

© The Gallery Press (from the cover of In My Fathers House

Seán Dunne at his desk in Scoil Lorcáin
© The Gallery Press (from the cover of In My Fathers House

Seán Dunne at his desk in Scoil Lorcáin

Seán Dunne at his desk in Scoil Lorcáin

© The Gallery Press (from the cover of In My Fathers House

Enlarge image

Seán grew up with his brothers Aidan and Brendan and his sister Breda. His mother Maureen died when Seán was just four and his youngest brother Brendan was not yet a year old. His father Ritchie kept the family together after his wife's death.

The first poem he ever wrote was a long account of the Vietnam war, filled with vivid images of slaughter. The poem ran over ten pages of a school copybook. He wrote a love poem to a girl he saw on the school bus every morning, he wrote a poem about the sadness of standing beside the sea. Poetry was becoming an obsession.

Seán ransacked the shelves of the Waterford City Library for books of poetry, finding for the first time modern poetry not found in the school books. The library, with its tall brown shelves and large tables in the reference room became his haunt every Saturday afternoon, he took three books home in a plastic bag from Besco supermarket to avoid the slagging should he be seen with a book of poems. He would often sit reading in the kitchen for hours after the rest of the house had gone to bed.

Seán went to study at University College Cork in the early 1970s and continued to live in Cork when his studies were fininshed. He worked in the Cork City Library mobile unit for a while with author Thomas McCarthy, actor Eamon Maguire and musician Noel Shine. McCarthy remembers; "The authorities called our unit Wanderly Wagon not because they couldn't locate us but because we didn't quite know where we were supposed to be located".

Seán began to work freelance for the Cork Examiner, becoming first sub editor, literary editor and then editor of the Weekend Examiner. His friend Thomas McCarthy wrote; "He was uncompromising in his attitudes, he didn't suffer fools gladly. Like all newspaper men he hated people who whined too much. For Seán, an artist working was like a Cistercian praying".

Many remember Seán singing 'a mighty singer at the drop of a hat' or his love for the fishing village Dunmore East and walks in west Cork.

Ellen Beardsley recalls in the Cork Examiner 12th August 1995 how he took a tutorial group at UCC holding them "firmly in his generous grasp for over two hours while speaking candidly about the creative process and poems. The ensuing essays were superb and evidence of the respect and self-reflection that Seán had engendered".