Tributes

Seán Dunne Festival - Jim Nolan opens the Young Writers Awards
© Waterford City Council - Arts Office

Among the many who paid tribute to Seán was his friend and fellow writer Tom McCarthy who said; "Seán's death will definitely leave a huge void in Irish literary life, similar to that a generation before by the death of Sean O'Riordain. It is not quite possible to take his death in fully. It is a disaster".

McCarthy added; "Seán Dunne was still a very young writer when he died: all his writing therefore is imbued with a spirit of first discovery, with the linguistic and spiritual strength of setting out and rushing forward".

Seán's Colleagues in the Cork Examiner wrote the following poem:

We remember how he sat,
silent, intense,
eyes on the flickering screen
across which winged his words,
his stock-in-trade, his very life;
amusing, entertaining, castigating
as a writer should an audience
he rarely saw, but intimately knew.
Suddenly from his monastic inner space
would come the wide smile,
the laughing word, eyes twinkling
beneath the agile brain
in devastating banter.
Now he has gone along his own
Road to Silence, back to His
Father's House.
The screen is blank. We are bereft.
May the Lord to whom he has returned give him rest.