A miracle of nature who wrote hymns to the joy of being alive

HE was a Stradivarius of the written word, fine-tuning the priceless instrument of his intellect to deliver music of incomparable depth and beauty, a supreme wordsmith's symphony of cultivated, eternal prose.

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At heart he was a seanchaí, a brother to John B. Keane and Brendan Kennelly, a descendant of Kerry's lyrical storytelling tradition, the Evening Press back page the turf-fuelled hearth around which the people would gather to be warmed by his tales.

In appearance, Con Houlihan resembled an old tenement building on the verge of collapse, but right until the end the architecture of his mind remained as immaculate and indestructible and awe-inspiring as Skellig Michael itself.

He wrote as a songbird trills, note perfect, uplifting, his entire being invested in the blessed process, a miracle of nature whose hymns to the joy of being alive invaded every nook and cranny of your being. He wrote sagely about culture, bravely about politics, elementally about sport.

Con lifted us over a turnstile at Croke Park or Lansdowne Road or Italia 90, perched us in a ringside seat, then served up a sensory feast, a banquet of sounds and smells, his perception gifting the rich flavours of the arena to his ravenous audience.

He would sauce his sentences with untypical yet gloriously enriching condiments - a line from Robert Burns, the architectural history of a Viennese cathedral, the mating habits of the swans on the Grand Canal.

His dispatches were part sports commentary, part lessons in life, part evocative postcard from whatever part of the world he was bending paragraphs to his will.

Without ever dipping a brush into a palette, he painted a series of masterpieces, works that invaded the soul of a nation.

MAGICAL

Like the Book of Kells or the game of hurling or a slowly settling pint of stout or the tumultuous, untameable boom of the Atlantic pounding the western shore, Con - it was always just Con, no second name or explanation required - was an Irish treasure.