THERE ARE FEW, if any, who better encapsulate Ireland of the last 60 years than Christy Dignam.
A survivor of sexual abuse as a child and as a teenager, a recovering addict, who spent six months in homelessness as an adult, who wrote some of the best-known and best-loved Irish songs of the past 30 years.
He was a man whose story encompassed length and breadth of the beauty and horror that has shaped modern Ireland.
At the age of 63, Dignam passed away on Tuesday afternoon, the news confirmed by his daughter Kiera, who is also a musician.
In a statement on Facebook she wrote: “It is with a broken heart that we convey the news of my father’s passing, Christy Dignam.
“Dad peacefully left us where he wanted to, at home today 4pm Tuesday, June 13th 2023, after a courageously long-fought battle, surrounded by his family.”
In life, Dignam rarely failed to charm. When an episode of The Late Late Show which had been planned as a tribute to Dignam and Aslan, had to be rewritten to keep up with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Dignam handled the manner with a straightforward grace.
Following a performance of Crazy World, host Ryan Tubridy said: “The lads were meant to be here to celebrate an amazing 40 years in the business and heading out on a big tour” at which point Dignam cut him off from the bandstand, and said: “Don’t even talk, it doesn’t matter about all that. That’s bullshit, compared to what’s going on.”
It would turn out to be one of the band’s final live performances, though not Christy’s. The singer was captured performing his life’s biggest hit in the corridors of Beaumont Hospital, where had been admitted in July 2022 under the care of the Haematology and Cardiac Care team.
In 2017, Dignam showed his commitment to the cause of ending homelessness, performing at the Apollo House occupation.
With Aslan, Dignam topped the Irish album charts six times, including a greatest hits album and a live album but unlike many other artists similar in stature and significance, it never felt as though there was anything to separate Christy Dignam from any person you might meet besides his genius.
His vibrant and charming spirit, his musical soul, these are things that we often believe to be inherent to the Irish personage. It’s a fairly fanciful notion that we have of ourselves, but it is thanks to poets and musicians such as Christy Dignam that the idea persists.
The immense hardships endured by the Finglas man – who was sexually abused over the course of years at a young age by a neighbour, and sexually abused once again by a man in whom he confided the original abuse – are tragedies that resonate in far too many households across Ireland.
That Christy spoke about them with such forthright dignity made him into a sort of mirror, an individual through which a nation processed a collective grief over the atrocious mistreatment faced by so many down through the decades.
“Right through my history and everybody that it has affected,” he said of the abuse in 2018, as part of a documentary about his life. “It has affected my wife, it has affected my family, it affected all my brothers and sisters, it affected all the band and all their families. It is like a ripple effect.”
It would be insulting to reduce Dignam’s story to one of triumph over adversity. The singer never put forward any pretence that the ghosts of his past had ceased to haunt.
Through that pain, Dignam forged a legacy of hope, joy, and most of all, music.
“Let us all hold him in our hearts and cherish the remarkable life of a talented singer, great story teller and amazing person,” Keira Dignam wrote in tribute to her late father.
Without a doubt we will.
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