THE FUNERAL OF acclaimed Irish novelist Edna O’Brien will take place in her native Co Clare tomorrow. 

The author died peacefully on 27 July at the age of 93 after a long illness. 

While she had lived in London for many years, she had expressed a wish to return home to Clare for her funeral service.

Her funeral mass will take place in St Joseph’s Church in Tuamgraney at 11am tomorrow.

She will then be buried in accordance with her wishes on Holy Island off the Co Clare shore in Lough Derg. 

The island, known as Inis Cealtra in Irish, is one of the most famous monastic sites in Ireland. People from Clare are still laid to rest in the cemetery there.

Speaking to RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, her nephew Michael Blake said he had helped to plan her funeral.

“The most important thing is she wanted to come back to Ireland. She wanted to have her services in the local church in Tuamgraney where she received all the sacraments when she was young, and she was adamant that she wanted to be buried on Holy Island,” he said.

Blake, who led the Irish showjumping team at the Paris Olympics, said O’Brien’s mother and other relatives are buried on the island. 

“Obviously the church is small, but we will have many television screens and speakers outside of the church tomorrow, and there’s lots of car parking and there’s lots of boats to get people to the island, because that’ll be a little bit of a logistical challenge.”

Blake also said that the late author wanted the last line of WB Yeats’s poem Under Ben Bulben, ‘Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by!’, inscribed on her tombstone. 

Tributes poured in both at home and abroad following the news of O’Brien’s death. 

President Michael D Higgins led tributes to his “dear friend” yesterday, calling O’Brien “one of the outstanding writers of modern times”. 

“Edna was a fearless teller of truths, a superb writer possessed of the moral courage to confront Irish society with realities long ignored and suppressed,” the President said.

An obituary published in The New York Times described O’Brien as a “firebrand” whose work delivered “searing, candid portraits of Irish society through the prism of female friendship”. 

It said that following the publication of The Country Girls, O’Brien became “Ireland’s most notorious exiled daughter, and its foremost chronicler of female experience”.