Eoin Collins

Commemorating the life and achievements of a visionary Irish LGBTQ+ champion

Eoin’s Favourite Things

This list of (some of) Eoin’s favourite things came about as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Eoin loved to walk in Central Park and we (Anne, Sheelin and Margaret) loved to walk with him. He often quoted Desert Island Discs and, one day in late March 2020, set us all the challenge of compiling ours. Eoin’s list (which you’ll find at the end here) was characteristically brilliant, and original, and very detailed!

When Margaret moved back to Ireland in April 2020 and had to quarantine for a fortnight, Eoin decided we four should zoom to keep her company and that we should have a quiz topic for our zoom. Over the next year and a half, until November 2021 and Eoin’s own return to Ireland, followed many zooms and many topics (favourite pieces of art, cities, museums….).

We decided to keep a record of our choices, initially in case one of us missed that evening, and later because we knew this was an exceptional time. We didn’t know just how precious it would be to have this now. Our hope is that Eoin’s family and friends enjoy reading this, and that it evokes your own special memories with him.

Margaret Kelleher, Anne Doyle, Sheelin Wilson

Irish art

  1. Dorothy Cross

2. Shane Berkery

https://www.nationalgallery.ie/art-and-artists/zurich-portrait-prize-2019/shane-berkery

3. Louis Le Brocquy

https://imma.ie/collection/the-tain-battle-field/

American Painters

  1. Keith Haring
  2. Jackson Pollock, One: Number 31, MOMA
  3. Edward Hopper, Room in Brooklyn
  4. Andrew Wyeth, Christina’s World

Favourite Museums

Top Meals

Eoin’s nominations

  1. Sushi Heaven with the Queens’ gang
  2. Chartier, Paris
  3. Fallon & Byrne winebar with small group of friends

Favourite witty lines

PG Wodehouse

“Aunt calling Aunt like mastodons bellowing across premieval swamps” 

All About Eve

Birdie : There’s a message from the bartender. Does Miss Channing know she ordered domestic gin by mistake?

Margo : The only thing I ordered by mistake is the guests. They’re domestic, too, and they don’t care what they drink as long as it burns!

Woody Allen “Love and death”: Sonja

I never want to get married, I only want to get divorced. 

Addams Family

Morticia : My baby is ill, and my husband is dying. Oh, Mama, what shall I do?

Grandma : Well, you have a black dress.

Eoin’s top (and worst) cities/towns

  • Top: Florence; Leuven/Louvain; Lisbon: London
  • Least liked: Belfast, Limerick

Most admired philosophers/thinkers

  • Bertrand Russell: Advise the future generations
  • Arthur schopenhauer “Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.” 
  • Wittgenstein: “Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.”

Eoin’s advice to the young (and to our younger/older selves)

  1. Don’t be so fearful all the time
  2. Come out the moment it’s feasible (otherwise you will regret the potential connections lost) and draw strength from your honesty rather than others’ prejudice
  3. Take your future life seriously: strike the balance between living for today and preparing for the future financially; don’t sniff at money: you’ll need it in your older life

People we’d like to have met/have to dinner

Eoin

  1. Dorothy Parker
  2. John Kenneth Gilbraith
  3. John Mortimer (see below, John Mortimer in conversation with Ludovic Kennedy)

Eoin on the topic of ‘beautiful people’

  • Paule Baillargeon from “I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing”: “something amazing about her looks and earrings in the movie”
  • Alain Delon in “The Yellow Rolls Royce”.
  • Jean Sorel from Day of the Jackal

House Tips

Eoin

  1. Don’t skimp if you can avoid it
  2. Believe in your own taste

Art Choices

  • The work of Ragnar Kjartansson at the Met: the circular video and song made him feel like he was in Iceland 
  • Wilhelm Hammershoi:. Eoin loved hearing that he was Michael Palio’s favorite artist too.
  • David Hockney – Eoin loved his work growing up,  including his CA stuff and also his landscapes of Northern England

Books that politicians should read

Eoin

Punishment for wrongdoers

A. Donald Trump: To be sentenced to a five year Buddhist Retreat on mindfulness and control of desire. And forced to sing this song every hour on the hour

B. Cardinal Raymond Burke: to be pinned to a float on Gay Pride in full regalia surrounded by go go boys dancing to the songs “It’s Raining Men” and “I’m Coming Out”

C. John Bolton. Misses the last helicopter out of Afghanistan as the Taliban arrive.

Best eurovision moments

Severine

Vicky Leandros 

Anne Marie David 

Irish foods: Eoin’s loves

  • Christmas Pudding
  • Fresh white soda bread with strawberry jam and butter, and cup of tea
  • White batch bread/turnover with cheddar cheese
  • King’s crisps

Irish foods: Eoin’s dislikes

  • Food with lots of fish sauce
  • Pig’s blood stew
  • Tripe!
  • Kidneys
  • Banana sandwich

Eoin’s Favourite walks

  • Central Park 
  • South Wall, dublin

Favourite podcasts

  1. In Our Time esp philosophy ‘Continental vs Analytic’ (Beatrice Han-Pile)
  2. Bowery Boys
  3. Sean Carroll Mindscape Podcast
  4. Youtube – Jonathan Miller, Short History of Disbelief; the Atheism tapes: interviews with Arthur Miller, Richard Dawkins, Denis Turner

Heroes

Mary Robinson, Tony Blair and Barack Obama

Favourite TV programs

  • Brideshead Revisited (with Jeremy Irons)
  • Sex and the City (“but I hated the movies”)
  • Queer as Folk (UK version)

Eoin’s favourite films

  • All About Eve
  • Moonlight
  • Edie
  • Radio Days: Eoin recommended it saying “it evokes New York to me more than anything else I know”
  • ‘The King’s Choice’ about King Haakon of Norway and his response to the German invasion in 1941: “Really wonderful”. 

Favourite lines from books

JK Galbraith: The Affluent Society

The opening line to The Affluent Society. Galbraith is my economist hero, dismissed by the left as being too moderate and by the right as being too socialist.

“Wealth is not without its advantages, and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.”

Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights

Nellie, servant for the Earnshaws and the Lintons, at the end of the novel, reflects at the graves of Catherine, Edgar Linton and Heathcliff:

“I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”

James Joyce: The Dead

At the end as Gabriel agonizes about love, death and the passage of time:

“Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead”.

Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway

At the start as Clarissa walks around London – putting in words the exhilaration of being in a city:

“In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; b arrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.”

Eoin’s Desert Island discs

1.  Man with the Child in his eyes, Kate Bush

I was passionately in love with a guy who worked for my father and used to think of him listening to this when our family toured around Cork in the summer of 1978.  I realized that if I could feel this kind of love for someone, then being gay could never be wrong and that I could only have a happy life if I was true to this love. When I hear the lyrics of Kate Bush’s song now I feel  huge compassion for my young self, especially when I hear the words: “Suddenly I find myself, listening to  man I’ve never known before, telling me about the sea and his loves to eternity” …. “Nobody knows my man”.

2. Duet from the Pearlfishers, Bizet and sung by Jussi Bjorling and Robert Merrill

My mother has a huge passion for all kinds of music and is convinced that Jussi Bjorling is the best tenor that ever lived. I particularly love this duet and think of her every time I hear it.

3. Last Time I saw Richard, Joni Mitchell.

My cure for despondency. It sounds mournful, but ultimately it’s about hope and how even the worst of times pass. Ends with “Dark cafes, only a dark cocoon, Before I get my gorgeous wings and fly away, Only a phase, these dark café days” 

4. Gnossienne, Eric Satie

When my father died, my mother bought a grand piano to help deal with her grief. This is one of the first pieces of music I heard her play on the new piano. It would remind me of her and of the seriousness and absurdity of my situation on the desert island.

5. Sandstorm, Darude

Some of the most intensely happy times of my life were dancing at raves in Dublin in the 1990s. Ecstasy was a big thing then and the music was built around the phases of the body’s reaction to it. This music reminds me of the almost spiritual pleasure of being synchronized in pleasure with a large crowd on the dance floor at the point when we were ‘up on our drugs’, the lingo for the most intense phase of its effect.

6. Song to the Siren

This, I confess, is something I originally heard on Desert Island Discs when it was played by Dawn French. I listened to it walking home to our apartment from work when I first moved to New York. On one bad day however, when I was feeling very negative about the city, I thought of Josep as a siren who had lured me on to the Manhattan rocks.

7. Hiroshima/Nagasaki, Christy Moore, sung by prisoners form H-Block

In 1990 the British Government allowed IRA and loyalist prisoners out on ‘week releases’, a first step in what eventually became the peace process. A friend of mine had been in contact for some time with an IRA prisoner who had come out as gay in Long Kesh, and agreed to host him on a trip to Dublin when he was released in the Christmas of 1990. I hadn’t been a supporter of Irish Republicanism at all and was reluctant to meet him but relented and went along to the pub expecting someone hard, with long hair and a beard. Instead, I was introduced to a man with short cut, jet black hair and wearing a pair of dark sunglasses as he was quite light sensitive after being in prison for so long. He smiled at me, said hello in a very soft accent and then took off his glasses to reveal intensely blue eyes.  I fell in love in that instant.

For more than three years I visited Brendi in Long Kesh every second weekend, taking the train to Belfast and then a bus provided by Sinn Fein for all the other war ‘widows’. Brendi loved music and played the guitar on this tape which was smuggled out in 1991. I find it almost unbearably sad to hear men perceived to be so hard, sound so vulnerable.

8. Ne andrò lontana, La Wally, Wilhemina higgins Fernandez, from the movie Diva.

Diva was a such a cult hit in the 1980s. When I eventually saw it made me really understand the power of opera for the first time. I have played this aria over and over again.

Book Selection

I think a book to help me navigate the stars at nighttime. I would imagine the sky would be very clear.

Luxury

I think a life supply of assorted drugs to help me face sad or fearful times.