Glinsk, County Galway: Sean Parker Has Come Home At Last: RIP

 

The last time Sean Parker was in Glinsk was in 1946

Around an hour before Sean Parker's funeral mass began, an elderly man walked into the church in Glinsk, Co Galway.

He took off his cap and knelt down. A short time later, he got up and left.
He had fulfilled his mission by paying his respects in front of a coffin carrying a man he didn't know.

Pat McGrath reports on touching scenes as Sean Parker was laid to rest

The last time Sean Parker was in the same village was in 1946, before his family left their home on the Galway / Roscommon border.

After the death of their mother Annie the previous year, the Parker family of five girls and two boys moved to Dublin with their father.

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A few years later, in the early 1950s, Sean Parker moved to England. He spent the rest of his life there, experiencing the same hardships many Irishmen of his generation did in London and other British cities in the mid-twentieth century.

Despite those ups and downs, memories of his Galway childhood endured. It was these recollections that led carers in southeast England to begin a search for friends or relatives of the 79-year-old here, when he died last July.

That journey came to an end when Sean Parker was laid to rest in Ballinakill Cemetery, a short distance from the village of Glinsk, on Wednesday afternoon.

Recognising the name when an official from Medway Council spoke to Joe Duffy on RTÉ's Liveline, local man Jimmy O'Toole called some others who would have known Sean Parker as a boy.
One sat beside him in school every day.

Another remembered his last day in the village, when the tearful ten-year-old left his beloved terrier dog in the care of a neighbour, before setting off for Dublin.

Others, who were slightly older, remembered carrying Sean's mother to her final resting place in the mid-1940s.

In the weeks that followed, the community came together to do all it could to ensure that the man who left them seven decades earlier would not end up in an unmarked grave in England.

All repatriation and burial costs were covered by businesses and individuals both here and in the UK. Sean Parker would be brought home and laid to rest beside his mother in Co Galway.
His last journey a mirror image of hers, as locals shouldered his remains on the half-mile walk from church to graveyard.

Joining this small community on a day filled with emotion, were people from Cavan, Clifden, Clare and elsewhere. None of them had any link with this village in northeast Galway.

None knew Sean Parker or much about the life he led. But his passing and his voyage home held a symbolism that was revealed in the eyes of those watching the simple coffin as it was carried from the church. Here was somebody's brother, somebody's son.

He could have been anybody's brother. Anybody's son.

The man who had left the village before the funeral mass began summed it up.

"I was in England too ... they were tough times ... but that's another story."

Enough for the moment to remember those who never made it home. And today, to remember one who did.
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