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A grave job but Tony's happy to do
it
12.02.08
WHEN you've been an
undertaker for more than 55 years, you would be
forgiven for getting a bit morbid.
Not so 75-year old Tony McLaughlin from Buncrana
who's adamant it's not a dark and depressing job at
all.
"It's a job you have to do and if you have faith in
it and say to yourself, well, I'm helping some
family at a hard time in their life, it's not a bit
depressing. If you have confidence in what you're
doing it's grand."
Tony ‘Wanish' as he's better known in Buncrana
started out in 1952 as an assistant to Hughie
Kearney in Cockhill after returning from a stint in
England. Kearney, after whom Kearney's Pass is
named, was also a refuse collector and alternated
between the two services. |
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"You could be burying
someone in the morning and collecting refuse in the
afternoon - that's the way it was, but you were
lucky if they didn't fall on the same day.”
He "felt very shy" for his very first funeral and
while he never kept count of how many people he's
buried over the years, "it's quite a few". |
It fell to Tony to bury
his boss when Hughie Kearney died in 1971 and he
stayed on to help his wife Mary. Mary eventually
died and the business passed on to her sister Rosie.
When Rosie decided to sell up in 1975, Tony bought
the business for the princely sum of £600.
He was also driving a minibus part-time for Raymond
McLaughlin who later joined him as a partner. The
company became and still is McLaughlin & McLaughlin
Funeral Directors.
He says the undertaking business has greatly changed
over the years.
"In the early days there was very little embalming.
It's only this last while that the embalming became
compulsory with so much cancer and sudden death and
other illnesses."
Despite more than a half-century in the business
“burying children and young people is still the
hardest." Sadly, the father-of-eleven and his wife
Agnes have buried two of their own children and a
grandchild - son Kevin who was just 2½ , daughter
Eileen who was only 23 and 12-year old grandson
Shaun who was killed in the Omagh bomb. He reflects
for a moment on their three faces side-by-side in a
framed picture on the wall of his Cockhill Park
home. He says dealing with death nearly every day
didn't equip him any better to cope when it came to
his own door.
"You feel it bad but at the same time you must let
go. There's nothing you can do about it." As for his
grandson's death in the 1998 atrocity, he says:
"When nobody has been brought to justice it still
makes it hard. If you knew somebody was taken up for
it and not out there enjoying themselves anymore you
could say 'well, at least they’re caught now and
that's it'." He's also angry at the "mess" relating
to the recent trial of Sean Hoey.
Meanwhile, he says death affects everyone the same.
"Death is the same in every place. I never saw a
rich house that coped with it any better than a poor
house.”
While he has no immediate plans to retire, he says
he has no special plans for his own funeral. "I hope
it's a good while yet but nobody knows when their
time is up.” And he thanked the bereaved of Buncrana
for their co-operation in difficult times.
“All I would say is that I hope I carried out the
work for them to their satisfaction and God rest the
dead." |
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