But in his sermon at McQuaid’s funeral, his successor as Archbishop, Dermot Ryan, acknowledged that perhaps ‘his statements of doctrine seemed insufficiently nuanced to rest easily on the consciences of his hearers’.34 He defended this inflexibility as a consequence of McQuaid’s saintly devotion to ‘absolutes’. Watching a very feeble, blind Eamon de Valera, still president, arrive at the cathedral for the Mass, I realized that the era of absolutes was fading.
