The Irish Way of Death

All their life in England, my folks took The Times and The Daily Telegraph. A good part of the reason was to scan the hatches, matches and dispatches small ads to see who among their pals, or their offspring, were experiencing change in status. In 2001 my father fell down the stairs and shortly afterwards died in hospital. His nuclear family sat around the dining table with the undertaker to disburse A Lot of money from the estate to get the Ou'fella up the chimney. We agreed that about ~2% of the spend = €200+VAT should be allocated to The Irish Times, to alert his remaining Irish friends and relations of his death.

In 1997, we bought the farm and moved to the deepest rural midlands of Ireland with two small children. We established a toe-hold in the local community as BlowIns from Dublin - mostly harmless. But we didn't inhabit the pub, nor did we go to mass; so we missed a bunch of funerals which we would def'n'y have attended out of respect to the departed and their relict family. After a few years, our abutting neighbour recognised this deficit in our social connexion and started to tell us when someone in or near the valley had gone. So at least we had a local work-around. 

Then in 2006 rip.ie was launched by Jay and Dympna Coleman, sibs from Co Louth. Dympna lived abroad, and because she was out of the loop, <dang!> missed the funeral of a school-friend's father. They reckoned there had to be a better way for the diaspora to keep tabs on what/who was going down back home. It rapidly became the national GoTo for finding out 

• who had died; 
• times & places of wake, removal, mass, interment;
• where/when of tea and hang-sangwiches continued to be announced, as ever was, at the end of the mass
  
• what were the names of all their collateral relatives, descendants and in-laws;
• flowers/no-flowers; donations; 

Timely transmission of these logistical details is important in a culture that embraces an almost Islamic briskness in progressing the process: if the corpse isn't underground on the Third Day, something has gone awry. In England it's completely different: cold-storage is a Thing and it might be more than a week before the departed, like, departs. It was Ten awkward and fraught days hanging around for this and that in England, before my widowed mother could get shot of everyone and start to process her grief. There is no doubt in my mind that the Irish do it better.

In May this year rip.ie was acquired by The Irish Times, the [protestant] paper of record and a commercial venture. Fair do's to the Colemans to have an exit strategy and be able to cash out on their brilliant and useful service. Their company Gradam Communications,  reported an operating profit of €40,373 for 2023. This is on turn-over of  €1.7 million with four employees. rip.ie is free to use and seems, like FANG, to generate its income from Ads - mostly from funeral directors, florists and monumental masons - who are banking no 60 million page views a month making a return on investment RoI.

 A piece on the RTE Brainstorm channel, digs into the not-for-profit value of rip.ie. This commercial venture has been orders of magnitude quicker at recording deaths than the government bureaucracy. Its archives also offer a unique insight into the Irish Way of Death: through the logistical details as listed above; but also through the capture of condolence messages of which there are an enormous number. And it's an on-line bonanza for where are your people buried? ancestry hunters at home and abroad. Here's a nice LiveLine story [1m15s to 10m25s] about how a 1930s communion photo was returned to its family through rip.ie condolence over-sharing.

The other tom-tom of death is the Local Radio. Death notices are read out immediately after the news several times a day! The delivery is always peculiarly dead - drained of affect without being robotic. Funeral Directors will, on behalf of the family, pay the radio ~€150 for 3x readings of the notice. So the still-living really need to check in every day . . . or miss a funeral that they really should have been at. On foot of the Brainstorm report cited above, the story was covered on DriveTime - the tea-time RTE Radio One magazine programme. They put the question out there:
Q: "What is rip.ie to you and how often do you check it?".
A: "I check the site every day before breakfast. If I'm not listed, I get on with my day!" as one wag put it.