Bernard Loughlin

Date of Birth:

3 February 1950

Bernard Loughlin (03.02.1950 - 19.10.2018) was the first director of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig in Co Monaghan. With his wife, Mary, he ran the artists’ retreat from 1981 to 1999, nurturing the creative endeavour of both beginner and established creative artists, making everyone feel equally at home in the country house that English theatre director, Tyrone Guthrie, had bequeathed to the Irish state. Born in Andersonstown, Belfast and the eldest of five children, Loughlin attended Queen's University for a time, editing the college newspaper the Gown but never graduating. Like many of his generation, he travelled to mainland Europe where he taught English and soaked up the rich cultural and linguistic landscapes of France, Switzerland, Germany and Spain. He first discovered the hilltop village of Farrera on a trip to the Pyrenees in November 1975 during a national holiday following the death of General Franco. Novelist and one-time journalist Colm Tóibín was teaching English in Barcelona at that time and he and Loughlin became lifelong friends. “At that time, Bernard spoke French, German and became fluent in Spanish in a few months and fluent in Catalan a few months later. He had an extraordinary gift for languages,” remembers Tóibín. “He also read a novel a day – in different languages – which made Bernard a great touchstone for me throughout my life. He was fully cosmopolitan, a pacifist without the burden of politics whether from Northern Ireland or Catalonia.” After a stint teaching English in Barcelona, Loughlin and his girlfriend at the time, Mary Rogan, rented a house, Can Felip, in the village of Farrera in Catalonia. They got married there in 1976 and their daughter, Maeve – born in 1977 – was the first child born in the village for more than 30 years. They then returned to Ireland, first to Belfast, then to Killybegs, Co Donegal (where Loughlin worked as a fisherman on a trawler) and then in Dublin, where he taught English. Their son, Eoin, was born in 1979 while the family lived in Dublin. He died following a freak accident in the garden of his home in the Pyrenean hilltop village of Farrera. Loughlin was buried in Farrera after a secular funeral conducted by author and family friend Michael Harding.