What has often been said of poets has long been true of Irish people generally: after death their reputation soars. Just think how many funerals you've been to where the deceased was "a great man", or how many "decent" women you've known that have been sent off with a cracking good wake. No doubt most of our dearly departed were both decent and greatly loved, but from what you hear at Irish funerals, you'd swear indecent women and terrible men never died at all.
The bald fact of the matter is that Irish people love nothing better than a good funeral. The funeral has always been a central social ritual in Irish society, outranking even marriage and baptism as a community rite. In Talking to the Dead, a new documentary to be broadcast on RTE 1 on Tuesday, the rich traditions associated with burial and bereavement in this country are sensitively examined in a beautifully-shot one-hour film from Galway-based Power Pictures.
Directed by Pat Collins and based on the book Talking to the Dead by Patrick Sheeran and Nina Witoszek, the film explores, as Sheeran puts it, "the obsessive hold that the dead have on the living in this country". The Irish fascination with death notices, Mass cards, with shaking hands at funerals and the like, gives weight to Sheeran's claim that death in Ireland is an obsession. Even our drinking toasts, "Bas in Eireann", are death obsessed. According to the documentary's producer, David Power, it is these practices associated with the ritual of dying that form the basis of the film.
"Death, in its various manifestations, is all around us," says Power, "in theatre, in film and literature, in the headlines of newspapers, or in the death notices on local radio."
Starting with ancient and pre-Christian traditions, Talking to the Dead moves on to look at how the funeral rite has changed in recent years. While the old practice of keening may have died out, there are still remnants of older traditions in the modern Irish funeral.
But, as the film documents, it was in prefamine Ireland that the more elemental and primal aspects of the burial rite dominated. Practices such as leaving the death house on the dawn following the death to howl out a death wail were once common. Not only did it tell the wider community that death had finally come but it acted as a physical release for the bereaved, with pent-up despair finding some kind of abatement in the discharge of a long and terrible cry. There were even traditions, apart from the banshee's howl, that announced the coming of death. Death was said to have a smell, the stale stench of which meant that death was near, or sometimes the vision of a boat bearing an image of the dead person meant that the end was close. Curiously the boat appeared to sail on land rather than on water.
While such traditions and folk beliefs are a little on the grisly side, there were other, more celebratory aspects to the ancient folk funeral. As Patrick Sheeran recounts in the film, there was a carnalist, even lewd, side to the traditional wake, which parodied church ritual and offered a licence for erotic abandon. Traditional wake games were more concerned with the sensual world of the living than they were with the sterile world of the recently deceased corpse. The church had always tried to curb and control the wildness of the wake, and after the famine of the 1840s, when the number of people dying made it impossible to wake the dead properly, the church stepped in and finally gained control of the rite for the first time.
Since then, the Irish funeral has continued to change. The emergence of funeral directors and more formal funeral homes has meant that waking at home has become rare. Yet funerals remain a vital community ritual in Ireland.
The perspectives touched on in the film include the distinctive funeral traditions of the Travelling community, the political significance of public funerals in Irish life - from paramilitary funerals to the recent funeral of former Taoiseach, Jack Lynch - as well as the importance of graveside orations in the Irish tradition.
"We incorporated an awful lot of material and angles," says Power. "Luckily we had no major transmission deadline or delivery date, so that gave us a lot of flexibility from the point of view of the edit."
Although there was no delivery date, it is a happy chance - or spooky coincidence - that the film was finished in time for Halloween. Around 10 p.m. on Tuesday, the spirits of the dead will be abroad and walking.
Talking to the Dead is on RTE 1 on Tuesday at 10 p.m.