Sunday 22nd March 2015 at 5pm – Thirty Years Later
When someone dies before their time, how do you make sense of it? As the years go on where can you find traces of the person you have loved and lost? How do you remember them? Does their short life still have resonance with your own?
On 26th July 1984, aged 29 and 2 weeks, Mike died as a result of a fall during a friendly soccer match. It was a pure accident. Nothing to blame – apart, maybe, from his enthusiasm for life and the fact that it had been a hot dry summer so the ground was hard. He left behind his wife Yvonne , baby son Matthew, parents Sean and Sheila, five sisters Mary, Cath, Sheila, Brigie and Anna, and a wide circle of friends.
Born in Dublin 1955, Michael de Courcy, sportsman, architect, kitchen porter, artist, activist, factory worker, thinker and classiscist, embraced all life had to offer. He travelled the world funded by proceeds of an exhibition of his paintings in the Project Arts Centre sending letters home on thin blue aerograms. He led the UCD students to occupy five Georgian houses in Pembroke Street, which were in danger of demolition, and his ideas on collaborative practices were influential amongst architects in the early 1980s. But above all Mike was a much-loved husband, father, brother, son and friend.
Mike is now dead longer than he was alive, and the people who he loved and who loved him are thirty years older. ‘Thirty Years Later’ tells the story of Mike’s life and explores the ways in which he still lives on through the memories of his mum, four younger sisters – Catherine, Sheila, Brigie and Anna , who were aged between 16 and 26 when he died, his friends architectural historian, Shane O’Toole and artist, Michael Kane, and his son Matthew who was just 9 months old when Mike died.
Narrated and produced by Sheila de Courcy
Production Supervision by Sarah Blake
Sound Supervision by Mark McGrath
First broadcast Saturday 6th September 2014, 2pm.