There was a large turnout in Cork yesterday at the funeral Mass for Dr Michael Kelleher, one of Ireland's best-known psychiatrists and a pioneer in suicide research.
Dr Kelleher was clinical director of St Anne's Hospital, Lee Road, Cork, and his work over more than two decades led to the formation of the National Suicide Research Foundation in 1996.
The chief concelebrants at the Requiem Mass were his cousin, Father Finbar Kelleher, Cloyne, Father Diarmuid Lenihan, Clogheen, and the Archbishop of Cashel, Dr Dermot Clifford.
In his homily, Dr Clifford paid tribute to Dr Kelleher's humanity, saying that he had never been an ivory-tower researcher.
Instead, he was always in touch with reality, and he understood the suffering of his patients and of people bereaved by suicide.
"He gave people the feeling that they counted and that they could count on him," the archbishop said.
Mental illness had, and still has, a social stigma, Dr Clifford added, yet Michael Kelleher had opened up the whole topic of suicide and mental illness.
He had treated the subject of suicide with honesty and wanted it treated with honesty. He wanted it to be faced up to and not denied.
At the same time, he had been totally opposed to sensationalism, even when he was fighting for funding for research projects. "Honesty, insight and balance were the hallmarks of his work."
The chief mourners at the funeral were his wife, Margaret, daughter, Katharine, sons Denis, Michael, Dominic and Eric, brothers Humphrey, Donnacha and Olann, and his sister, Sophie.
Among the attendance at the funeral Mass were his medical colleagues. Also present were representatives of the Southern Health Board; the Oireachtas and local authorities; the charitable organisations he had been associated with, such as the Society of St Vincent de Paul; the National Suicide Research Foundation and other groups working in the area.
The Church of Ireland was represented by the Very Rev Michael Jackson, Dean of Cork, and the Jewish community was represented by Mr Gerald Goldberg, a former lord mayor of Cork. The burial ceremony took place privately.