Roy Curtis: ‘Christy Dignam was loved because he was a voice for those seldom heard’

“Love is blind,” sang the Finglas minstrel, “love is real, don’t you know that love is what you feel.”

The sadness that descended on many who had never met the man when the news broke that he had lost his long, heroically upbeat fight for life confirmed the essential truth of those words.

A tender, profound kind of affection colonised a lot of those strangers at the core. Because, yes, love truly is what you feel.

Aslan’s front man was loved because he was a spokesman for the underclass, a voice for those too seldom heard.

Because he represented unvarnished truth in a world of spin, bulls*** and cynical faux concern.

Because, right to the end, he was real.

His anthems implanted self-esteem and an assurance that they were not alone in a tribe that had been made feel like perpetual makeweights in the game of life.

Kiera Dignam thanks the thousands who came to Finglas to pay respect to her father Christy Dignam

Christy spoke to the marginalised in a voice they could comprehend. He was fluent in the language of their pain, familiar with the landscape of their crazy world.

Because he lived in it.

“I’m not so young anymore/I’m still standing here/but nothing’s changing for me.”

Christy’s verses, his unflinching detailing of struggle and addiction, formed a life-raft for the emotionally shipwrecked.

He left us in the week of Bloomsday, the annual celebration of James Joyce and Ulysses.

And that felt somehow appropriate.

A century apart, in very different voices, Joyce and Dignam articulated the story of their Dublin.

Empathy, a rare emotional intelligence, was the alpha of Christy’s claim to greatness.

Last Tuesday, I was sent a link to the old Late Late Show footage of Christy joining Finbar Furey to for a powerful duet of The Green Fields of France.

It is simply beautiful.

Dignam sings as if Willie McBride was his blood brother, emptying himself into the song, the look in his eyes that of somebody mesmerised by a hypnotist’s timepiece.

Every piece of himself is invested in his chat with the stricken solider.

As he once explained: “I went to singing lessons for 13 years and my singing teacher told me, ‘you have to have every cell of your body in every note you sing’. And that’s been a mantra for me since I started. I just live whatever the song is.”

People who touch people emotionally may stop breathing, but they never die. Because they endure forever in the abundance of lives they improve.

Christy was not alone in offering proof of that over this past week.

Love was what they were feeling down in Cork last weekend as Teddy McCarthy was interred in his native Rebel soil.

Gone at 57, the immune-to-gravity sky walker who soared to uncharted GAA terrain in the summer of 1990 – winning hurling and football All-Irelands in an unprecedented and glorious two-week September assault on the history books.

Hurling reaches a part of the Cork psyche that other pursuits are powerless to attain.

It is a badge of identity and Teddy Mac, like Ring or JBM before him, became a mythical figure in the Rebel story – not a particularly tall man, but one who could fly, dancing, as if weightless, on currents of air to pluck a sliothar from the heavens.

A human kestrel. A creature fired from the mouth of a canon. A two-legged Pegasus.

I have no direct connection with Limerick or Clare, Galway or Kilkenny, the quartet who transformed a midsummer Sunday afternoon into something close to a religious experience, but by the end of the second game last weekend I was pulsing with an uplifting sense of place.

If I were asked to explain what being Irish meant to me, I would answer with a highlights package from these games that are uniquely ours.

Ireland gets many things terribly wrong, but in hurling we midwifed something magical into this world.

Similar masterworks three decades ago secured Teddy McCarthy a penthouse suite in the hearts of his tribe.

Last week his people came out to give a little back, to thank a figure who had enriched their existence. They cried, they loved, they remembered, they offered their gratitude, they said their goodbyes.

Just like those who, in their thousands, lined the byways of Finglas on Saturday.

Christy Dignam was one of their own, an urban poet, a storyteller, a man who faced up to imminent death without a trace of self-pity.

A creature who knew torment, but found a way to keep on keeping on. The very definition of bravery.

A man who announced in song that “all I have is everything to me”.

A life-giving sun around which his people, like planets in search of heat and light and guidance, had the good fortune to orbit.