When God distributed life-enhancing qualities, he passed a double helping to Dessie Donnelly. Anyone who came in contact with him, even briefly, came away enriched, more aware of how good it is to be alive.
Dessie’s own life was packed tight with experience. Who amongst us will have received all seven sacraments prior to turning 40, but Dessie Donnelly was not like others.
Born in Belfast’s Hamill Street in 1933, the eldest – and last surviving – of eight siblings, Dessie attended St Patrick’s school in Donegall Street before moving to St Mary’s Christian Brothers at Barrack Street.
His early education was interrupted by the Second World War, and his family moved to live for some years in Glenariffe, renting a small cottage and triggering a lifelong love of the Glens of Antrim.
Dessie was a man for animated stories, which he could retell with precise detail. No tale was told in a straight line, instead meandering to be filled in with colourful details to do justice to those he’d met along life’s journey.
After spending his first 20 years living in Belfast, he moved to northern Rhodesia in 1955, where he worked as a railway guard.
Having become friendly with Franciscan priests through his work with the Legion of Mary, he decided to enter the seminary in Africa. He was sent to study in the US and was ordained in 1964 in Minnesota, serving as a priest both in Africa and in the town of Chicago Heights for five years, where he met Marcy, with whom he ultimately made the decision to start a life together after his priestly vows were annulled.
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He moved to Phoenix, Arizona in the late 1960s, working in real estate and as a truck driver, delivering coffee to locations across Arizona and California, including to John Wayne’s farm – a story he loved to tell.
After successfully organising and leading a strike to secure equal pay with Californian colleagues, he accepted an invitation to become a Teamsters union organiser, later moving to take up a similar post with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
He was elected a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco in 1984, where he worked alongside the renowned Irish-American legal figure Paul O’Dwyer to secure support for the MacBride Principles for the first time.
In December 1985, Dessie and the family (now including three kids) moved to Belfast, where he took over Peter’s Bar in Gresham Street, renaming it the Arizona Bar.
Dessie loved to spend nights deep in conversation with his regulars, as likely to herald from Sandy Row and the Shankill as the New Lodge and Falls, something he was quite proud of during the dark years of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Every morning, he’d take a container of holy water and sprinkle every room of the bar. The pub stayed safe all through the Troubles, and he finally sold up and retired in 1999.
He remained as active as ever, throwing himself into learning the Irish language and meeting up with his trusted friends, Hugh Donnelly and Jude Collins, for a weekly Friday session to develop their conversational fluency – though the conversation turned frequently down side-roads to memories of plays, pantomimes and all kinds of everything from old Belfast.
He loved a busy house, and was always in his element on a Sunday afternoon when the children and grandchildren would converge for dinner and games. A game of charades was quite the spectacle, and he could be counted on to not just bend but smash the rules to ensure his team would get enough clues to guess the answer.
Dessie had an unquenchable interest in people. “How are things – everybody all right?” he’d say. He was non-judgemental, positive and open to everyone he met, from the highest to the lowest in society.
It wasn’t so much that Dessie did good things – he simply was a good man, open and caring. His Catholic faith meant a lot to him, and while he walked the family dog, he’d count the rosary beads in his pocket.
Anyone who came in contact with Dessie, even briefly, came away enriched, more aware of how good it is to be alive
He could recite details from old movies and novels seen and read decades earlier. His favourite poem was by A E Housman, learnt in childhood, and its sweet-sad lines stayed with him through a long, loving life:
“Into my heart an air that kills / From yon far country blows / What are those blue remembered hills /What spires, what farms are those?
“That is the land of lost content / I see it shining plain / The happy highways where I went / And cannot come again.”
Dessie is survived and sadly missed by his wife Marcy, children Margaret, Chris and Desmond and five grandchildren.