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He survived electroshock treatments and the threat of lobotomy to become one of Ireland’s most popular poets. The Irish Times called him a “literary phenomenon.”
By Michael S. Rosenwald
Paul Durcan, an Irish poet whose droll, sardonic and frequently tender poems about lads in dimly lit pubs, quotidian life in the countryside and the trauma of political violence made him one of Ireland’s most popular writers of the 20th century, died on May 17 in Dublin. He was 80.
His death, in a nursing home, was caused by age-related myocardial degeneration, his daughter Sarah Durcan said.
