Fr Dave McGarry is dead. How I hate writing those words but it was coming up and I was steeling myself for the final news. I was on the platform of Connolly Station in Dublin, having caught the Saturday morning early train, when my wife, Helen, rang to tell me Dave had died on Friday, 14th December 2012. I am not sure of his age but I think about 73. Myself and Dave go back a long way and I will trace our lives later but standing on that station platform will be etched in my mind as one of those iconic dates and places when something tragic happened. Kennedy’s death, Aberfan in 1965 and the United plane crash in 1958 are the three moments I am thinking of. Dave’s death ranks with those.
Dave had left St Bede’s in the summer of 1957 as I started in the September. Although he had left and gone to Rome his presence remained at the School, his sporting prowess at football and cricket echoed down Our Lady’s Corridor for many a year. We met up for the first time on a hillside overlooking Lake Albano in the summer of 1961. The Pope’s summer residence was across the waters of the lake. We were surrounded by Cardinals and Archbishops, there was a Eucharistic Congress of sorts to do with Vatican II but we were there for some serious business. St Bede’s College were playing the Venerabile, the English College in Rome at cricket. Dave I think was in his last year of seminary, he got a few wickets for them and I got a few runs for the school and we beat the older chaps.
I really came across him again some years later on the Old Bedian tours of the Wye Valley in the mid to late 60s led by those two stalwarts and gifted cricketers, Chris O’Rourke and the mad fast bowler, Joe Smith, who then taught Attic Greek at Stoneyhurst. I always wondered what Xenophon would sound like in Joe’s broad Unsworth accent. Dave was our official padre and middle order batsman, his knees already degenerating of neglect from the football field.
I was on the road in those days traveling and working on the motorways that were being built all round the country. Dave at the time was at St Joseph’s in Longsight under the pupillage of Fr Kavanagh, a late vocationer, who had been married and knew how to run a house. No housekeeper for him, Kavanagh was the slave driver to Dave’s kitchen maid. He hated it and if I was in town on a Friday night, I would wait out the back of the presbytery, Dave would climb out of a window into the car and off to a pub up town. It was around this time that Dave was mugged on Plymouth Grove. He said to me a few days later, “honest Paul, if I had a thousand pounds on me they could have had it but I only had a penny, I felt dead sorry for them”.
Now we all know that Dave drank too much at one time but any one with the pressures young priests had on them in those post Vatican II days would have turned to drink. It wasn’t that he drank too much, he just could not hold it as well as some and the odd bully would take the piss but Dave, as all good men do, learnt to live with his faults and eventually weaned himself away. However pressures remained, the episcopacy undiminished.
He wasn’t a lover of the hierarchy of Salford, he always used to say that if the diocese had been a commercial enterprise it would have gone bust years ago. As a 30 year old priest, the grimacing Geoff Burke, Auxiliary Bishop of Salford, was treating him like a 14 year old kid at Bede’s. Burke’s boss, the crazy Thomas Holland, Bishop of Salford for 20 years too long, almost made him renounce his vocation. I have a list as long as my arm of priests disaffected with the antics of Holland and Burke who decided to call it a day. Dave soldiered on mainly because of his love for the people and for instilling in kids the benefits of sport. His knowledge of international sport was tremendous and except for his vocation he could have graced the sports pages of a national newspaper.
And so it went on, Dave grabbing games where he could, never being able to settle at any club because of his priestly commitments. He could fetch up anywhere. I remember playing against Manchester Buses in a Wednesday night game at their splendid sports ground on Mount Road in Gorton. At one end was Chester Watson, once the pride of the Caribbean, fast bowler of prominence with the West Indies but now a bus driver with Manchester Corporation sending down 90mph thunderbolts at one end and the Rev Dave floating over his little tweakers at the other.
Eventually Dave settled into a parish after being a curate in several and made his name at St Catherine’s in Didsbury, where he was my parish priest for many years. He had many tussles with the stuck up sods of that parish but in the main most people loved him and he eventually won them all over with his innate goodness. He was one of them, he had his faults like everybody has, he could empathise with them in their troubles. He was close to them. There was never a gap between him and the parishioners. Most priests because of their retarded emotional development do distance themselves, they cannot react to the pressures some suffer. Dave wasn’t like that, he was working class Newton Heath, what you saw is what you got.
He became the unofficial go to man for all Old Bedians down on their luck, many of them dying prematurely as a result of their experiences at that school. If they were living he would sub them, never really getting it back. If they were dead and many were, he would bury them and give them a great send off but he was too nice a man to dig into why they were in the positions they were, although deep down he knew. We had many conversations over the last few years. He knew where I stood and he would meet me halfway down the road to accepting clerical sexual abuse was widespread but he could not condemn. When talking about one priest who was in a neighbouring parish to him in Salford who we both knew to be an abuser, all he would say was that he, the Salford priest, was a man you would not meet up with, a man you kept at arm’s length. He just could not condemn.
Yet he rued the day that whilst in recovery down in Stroud that he was half instrumental in letting that Fr Andy Lowe become PP of St Catherine’s. Brain the bishop covered up a lot of what actually went on with that guy and because of it he got away with six months imprisonment. It should have been at least six years and longer. For the last eight or nine years Dave has beaten himself up over that.
So that is all I have to say about the man, a true priest in the style laid out by JC, loved by all who knew him and thousands did. Our last conversation was slightly acrimonious, he rang me six months ago, telling me his illness was not improving but that he was battling on, he wanted to know why I was still fighting the abuse suffered at Bede’s. Although he knew of it he could only forgive, he had not the heart to condemn. I saw the victims and could not forget. I will be going over to Manchester on Wednesday, hopefully his Requiem will have been ordered by then. I’ll be there if I have to walk over every priest in the diocese. He was the best and Salford and Brain did not know it.
STOP PRESS – I have just learnt that Dave’s funeral is on Thursday 20th December at St Catherines at 12 noon, however I have had no absolute confirmation.