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New Year’s Day 2022. 14 years ago on 1 January, the well-known Irish writer John O’Donohue celebrated the New Year and his 52nd birthday with his German partner in Maubec, a small town in the south of France. Three days later he was dead. Today, John O’Donohue would have turned 66. Since then, myths and rumours have surrounded the unconventional life and the surprising death of the world-renowned author of Anam Cara. Because very little was known about John O’Donohue as a person, he appeared to be more mysterious year after year.
Many stories were doing the rounds. I wanted to know what was true and what was not, how the writer and poet from the Burren really lived, how he loved and how he died. One focus of my work in the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 was therefore extensive research into the life and work of the man who preached as a Catholic priest in churches in the west of Ireland in his younger years and who, in the fifth decade of his life, became a world-renowned spiritual author and teacher, and for many even a guru.
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After extensive research, I have described the life of John O’Donohue in a ten-part series which appears exclusively here on Irlandnews. In translation, the series is now also attracting attention in the English-speaking world. Before further processing and some follow-up research, I present the ten parts here as recommended reading for the new year:
Philosopher-Poet John O’Donohue would be 65 years old now
Part 1: Introduction to the life and work of John O’Donohue (CLICK).
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John O’Donohue: The Man from the Burren
Part 2: At the O`Donohue family grave in Fanore, County Clare. The start of research (CLICK)
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John O’Donohue: The Fateful Years of a Priest
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John O’Donohue: Once a Priest, always a Priest
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John O’Donohue and the Lonely Cottage in Connemara
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Kevin Hegarty on John O’Donohue: “He was always fearless”
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Courageous activists against the sell-out of Ireland’s west
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John O’Donohue: How he loved and how he died
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John O’Donohue: No Poet Without a Poem
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John O’Donohue: A Guru at the Crossroads (Part 10)
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Photos (top to bottom): Hans-Ruedi Hebeisen (1 and 11); dtv (2. from above); Markus Bäuchle (3,6,8); Hessischer Rundfunk (4,5,7); Gerold Schumann (9), Eliane Zimmermann (10)
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I am very glad to have discovered John O’ Donohue. And to know about Bernard and Kevin Higgins as a result of following rabbit holes through the internet. I would love to share the story about trying to find John’s books but I will save it for now.
What interests me most is the dual representation of the Irish man- John and Bernard. They are 2 sides of one coin but both telling the story of the Irish. On- beauty, rythym, lilting. The other, struggle, abandonment, splintered speech.
I also feel in my gut, John’s death was either planned or contrived. But it’s nice he finally found true love.
Dear Marcus – thank you for your in depth research into the life of John O’Donohue. His work has helped many people – not just in the US, but in many places. It seems he gave of himself without limits, and perhaps was asked to do too much once the public appeal for him surfaced. His poem ‘For one who is exhausted’ may have come from his own experience.
You have shone a light on much of the mystery surrounding John and shown him to be a very human being who tried to follow his own heart. The mystery surrounding his death, need not have been a mystery. If he died of a heart attack, why not say so, millions do at his age.
So thank you for your work and for sharing it with us. An excellent piece of journalism.
Best wishes
Theresa
Thank you very much for the kind words, Theresa. I am working on more stories about the life of John.
The stories are our gift. Readers can support our journalism with a donation.
Thank you very much for the kind words, Theresa. I am working on more stories about the life of John.
The stories are our gift. Readers can support our journalism with a donation.
Thank you for all your work, research and sharing. I met John twice (1997) and he’s always held a special place in my heart. I ended up being drawn more toward David Whytes work as the years passed but John’s death was profound and I’ve always felt a closeness with him. Reading his last book so many times and using it for readings as I taught yoga, kept him alive in my memory and heart. I esp. appreciated the last interviews, the one with Dara. It resonates and helps me to see John more fully as the complex and multi nuanced individual he was (and we all are).
Thank you again! Blessings,
Victoria
Thank you for your kind words, Victoria.
Hi Marcus
You have such a vast amount of material about John O’Donohue that it took me a day to assimilate it all. I first looked him up some time ago as a result of discovering another Irish person than myself who had seriously studied Hegel. I don’t want to say that he is a fraud, so I will say that he suffered from extensive self deception that Fintan O’Toole in his latest book about ‘Not knowing ourselves’ speaks about; in that he never added anything Hegelian to his subsequent ‘Celtic’ writings, and Hegel detested anything that smacked of the ‘given’ in philosophy. You may see him as a linguistic genius, capable of mastering the German language AND the Hegelian dialectic in a few short years in Tubingen
Im afraid that springs from the fact that nobody else takes his Hegelian scholarship anymore seriously than he does himself. It is their to bluff his extensive New Age audience in America. I have no doubt it is possible to learn German to the level of being able to read Hegel, but it is not the German of a writer like Heinrich Boll; it is the german of a writer trying to forge a new language capable of reinterpreting the whole western canon of philosophy from Socrates and Aristotle to Spinoza and Kant in order to understand the Modernity that the French Revolution ushered into Germany and the world . And that is to say nothing about the figures such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Marx, Foucault, Schleiermacher, and all the post-modernist gang that have built on Hegel’s Phenomenology since Hegels death in 1831. Im work on the non-metaphysical Hegel of Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard and there are as many Hegel’s currently, but none that are Celtic mystical that I ever heard of before. That is a new one for the books!
And that O’Donohue still claimed to remain a priest while doing so even though Hegel had a particular animus against Catholic papal claims to represent a rational God., Im afraid I regard O’Donohue as a charlatan, and the excuse that he is a poet – one commentator called his writing ‘genius doesn’t stand up to the reading of a single paragraph. Too often it reads like cliche and windbaggery masquerading as profundity. He is a man who wants to have his cake and eat it, but then that has been the role of the Catholic church in Ireland and where ever else it has a hold, and that brings me to a more sinister aspect to the man/priest.
People talk about his much vaunted political radicalism, his worry about the commercialisation of The Burren, and Ireland in general. If he feels that he has secured his philosophical reputation, his theological reputation is secured by remaining a priest, a superior ontological being, who has the power to turn bread and wine into the body and blood of a God who became a ‘man’ (whatever that may mean), But it is clear that he experienced the same biological desires as all other living creatures, the desire for a sexual mate, only in humans it has the extra dimensions of self consciousness and expresses that through culture, knowing the self. through others.
Never mind about the strange Christian spirituality of Connemara. This is the same where nuns were stuffing dead babies down sewer pipes in a Tuam ‘orphanage because they neglected them as ‘the product of sin’’, the same area in which priests were sexually abusing infants and denying it in Letterfrack from the 1920s onward so that one young man to whom this happen to joined the British army and was captured by the Germans and described his treatment by the Nazis camp as being a holiday camp compared to what he experienced as a child in Letterfrack (all in Peter Tyrell’s autobiography) He killed himself here in Hampstead Heath when I first came to London in the mid 1960s: he set himself alight and died in the flames.
Or read James Deeny, the Dublin Medical Officer of Health, description of the treatment of Irish emigrants by Mr deValera leaving for England in his autobiography ‘To care and to Cure. It reads like something from the Nazi period It is no wonder that the same Irish leader send condolence to the German embassy on the death of Hitler.
I am a great admirer of Kant and Goethe and Hegel and Fichte; but my point is that O’Donohue was all things to all men and did very well financially out of it. He enjoyed multiple benefits, he was like the two priests who attended Pope Paul in Galway – Bishop Casey and Fr Cleary – in that they were fathers in the biological as well as the theological senses. I though the treatment of both his family and himself of the woman he lived with was shoddy in the extreme in that the will of this much vaunted prose writer was not clear enough to give his lover some comfort and security after he was gone. It is a sad story from what I can glean from what I have read.
So excuse haste in scribbling this note, but you know my phone number and give me a ring and perhaps I can clarify any ambiguous point, and if you happen to be passing through London you are very welcome to call and have a coffee.
Kind regards
Bernard