Joe was a wonderful, good natured and loving father, husband, granddad and friend to everyone. He was like a private emergency service who sprang into action to support any call for help no matter how large and small. Meanwhile, he would attend to DIY emergencies and car trouble on a near daily basis. When I first got to know him, I think we both quickly realised that his skill set was one that I could never emulate. My ineptitude in these areas were a great source of amusement to him. As he once observed: “Andrew thinks manual labour is a Spanish cocktail.”
When Daressa and I bought our first house, we could not have managed without Joe’s untiring assistance and support. That was even more the case when we moved to our current home. When he became a granddad, Joe (and Vera) offered us huge support, so that we could juggle parenthood with our working lives. (We wouldn’t have managed without them). Joe doted on Patrick and Cian. And they loved him. His patience, inventiveness and care in entertaining and nurturing them was peerless.
Finally, Joe’s dedication as a Saints fan was without parallel. He was an unpaid Performance Analyst before the term had been conceived. Following any game, no matter what the result, he would immediately watch and then re-watch the video. If it hadn’t been televised, he would be first in the queue to rent a copy of the video from the club. He provided expert analysis through pause, freeze frame, re-wind and frame by frame analysis of how each try had been scored or conceded. If that wasn’t enough, no transgression by the referee or opposition player would get by him through application of the same painstaking process. The rest of the family would always try to silence any confident prediction of a result, particularly during the course of a game, as it was guaranteed to put a hex on the team’s performance!
Above all, what Joe gave to all of us was an infectious love of life that made him so loved and popular.
Asmullen
29th March 2020