‘Spartacus in a sports-jacket’

FAMILY MAN?The late SeΡn Staunton is pictured with his three daughters Leone, Sarah, Reine and wife Sal at a function held in Knockranny House Hotel to mark his retirement from The Mayo News in 2006.

‘Spartacus in a sports-jacket’


Reine Staunton’s eulogy on her father celebrates a man who’s public persona was a simple extension of a devoted family man

Áine Ryan

THE sight of SeΡn Staunton donned in an apron and up to his oxters in flour is not one that invokes familiarity for the majority of people. Most knew him as a suited and rather formally dressed man. But behind closed doors, the quintessential family man was prepared to experiment — albeit fleetingly — with that mysterious art called cookery. Well, just as long as there was help with the mountain of washing-up.  
According to his eldest daughter Reine, who spoke on behalf of her Mam, Sal, and her two sisters, Leone and Sarah, at yesterday’s Requiem Mass, SeΡn’s prowess at wheelbarrowing the grandchildren around the house proved far more fun than embracing a gardening experiment he had considered. (Although the devoted grandfather was more a magician and purveyor of marbles than a Peppa Pig enthusiast.)  
And when the three girls were still children, Sunday drives were magical odysseys where the ordinary became the extraordinary. In Reine’s eloquent words,  a world where ‘a trickle down a mountainside in Doolough [was] our waterfall’ and ‘Sunday spins to Silver Strand or Kylemore with him at the wheel slugging Cidona seemed the height of adventure’.
Of course,  his soulmate and best friend, Sal, ‘the love of his life’, was always there in the middle of these adventures. His ‘constant, quiet inspiration’.
“Their love and respect for each other was immense, and their easy and enduring friendship something to which any of us might well aspire. Mammy has been a tower of strength throughout our lives, but particularly since Dad got sick, and he would not mind me singling her out for special mention and thanks today from him and us,” Reine explained to the large congregation.
Indeed, from SeΡn’s own childhood days at The Quay, he had received ‘a good grounding growing up with his mother, Sarah and father, Eddie, and six brothers — Tommie, Eamon, Pat, Ger, Laurence and Joe — at number 13, McNeela Terrace’.
“It was a lucky 13,” Reine said. “His brothers were his closest friends then in the early days at The Quay and remained foremost among his friends throughout his life – Laurence and Eamonn’s company was great comfort to him in recent times, as always, and we feel their sorrow too today. The untimely deaths of their brothers, Tommie, Ger, Pat and Joe were a great sadness to Dad.”

Public persona
SHARING SeΡn’s many gifts and convictions with the community at large — in his role as a local politician, Editor of The Mayo News, and the many voluntary organisations with which he was associated — was, for the family ‘simply an extension of the man we knew as husband and father and whom many of you knew as a friend’. “There was no difference between the public and private man, in effect, because everything Dad did, he did it out of love – in the service of family, friendship, community or country,” Reine remarked.  
“SeΡn Staunton made the world feel like a better, safer, happier and more just place. He had an innate wisdom and when you sought his counsel, problems no longer seemed insurmountable. Those of you who knew him well will know he was generous with his time, and advice and solutions usually presented themselves after a chat with him.
“You could trust his judgement. You might have had to see the other side of the story first, that was his strength – he made you look beyond yourself, no decision was rashly arrived at. He excelled at common sense, clear thinking and had integrity in spades – skills which stood to him in his many pursuits and were core to his journalistic vocation,” she continued.
Séan may not have been a globetrotter, observed Reine, with a sense of irony reminiscent of her father’s subtle sense of humour. “Notwithstanding his broadminded nature and knowledge of world affairs, he didn’t put his passport under pressure. Westport was his world and Westport people his most sought after company.”

A broad and tolerant vision and ethos
“Dad welcomed informed debate on all matters, knew the value of diversity, was wary of ideological absolutism in any field and was not afraid to admit when he was wrong. He did not believe anyone had a monopoly on wisdom or propriety,” she added.
This bright inquiring mind was anchored by a deep spirituality symbolised by that ancient holy mountain, Croagh Patrick, which right up to his last days in Knockfin, framed his daily reflections on his love of his home place. His God was one ‘of unconditional and boundless love and he believed that each of us, believer and non-believer alike, is an instrument of divine love’.   
“He had no real desire to be elsewhere – even in his last hard days in hospital, his only goal was to get home and he was singleminded in his pursuit. Typically, having set his heart on it, he achieved it. He spent his last days encased in the love of his family and friends in the place he loved best,” Reine said.  
  SeΡn’s pride in his three daughters was so great, they could have ‘become the subject of beatification proceedings’. Even when he was vey ill and returning from Galway after chemotherapy, he would insist on stopping to buy lottery tickets, in a bid to pay off their mortgages before he passed away.  

Lop-sided jacket
“HE was a simple man in the best sense of the word. He had no desire for worldly gain or status. As long as he had a good stock of largely identical suits, and adequate reserves of hankies, ties and socks, he wanted for nothing. I described him once to a colleague as ‘Spartacus in a sports jacket’ and he will leave a slightly lopsided jacket-shaped hole in our lives.”
As family and friends come to terms with his passing, his eldest daughter quoted the words of a favourite writer of her father’s, the Catholic mystic, Thomas Merton.
“You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognise the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.”

Elsewhere mayonews.ie
Thousands bid fond farewell to Westport’s SeΡn Staunton
SeΡn Staunton, community man with a broad vision
Memories of a great man