Douglas Hyde - State Funeral

State Funeral

As a former President of Ireland he was accorded a state funeral. A problem arose; as a member of the Church of Ireland his funeral service took place in Dublin's Church of Ireland St. Patrick's Cathedral. However, contemporary rules of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland prohibited Roman Catholics from attending services in non-Catholic churches. As a result all but one member of the Catholic cabinet, Dr. Noel Browne, remained outside the cathedral grounds while Hyde's funeral took place. They then joined the cortège when his coffin left the cathedral. Éamon de Valera, by now Leader of the Opposition also did not attend, being represented by a senior Fianna Fáil figure who was a member of the Church of Ireland, Erskine Childers, a future President of Ireland himself. Hyde was buried in Frenchpark, County Roscommon at Portahard Church, (where he had spent most of his childhood life) beside his wife Lucy, his daughter Nuala, his sister Annette, mother Elizabeth and father Arthur.

Read more about this topic:  Douglas Hyde

Famous quotes containing the words state and/or funeral:

    The real stumbling-block of totalitarian régimes is not the spiritual need of men for freedom of thought; it is men’s inability to stand the physical and nervous strain of a permanent state of excitement, except during a few years of their youth.
    Simone Weil (1909–1943)

    Rome, the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.
    George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)