We were saddened to hear of the death of Gabriel on 6 April 2026 after a long struggle against cancer. He was an extraordinary man with an extraordinary mind who wrote more than 400 books, bringing Irish Gaelic to the world’s literary circles.

He described himself as ‘a poet-translator, tankaist, haikuist and, in the words of Hugh MacDiarmid, “a champion of forlorn causes”’. He was also a widely published children’s writer. He will be greatly mourned, especially in Ireland; click here to read the tribute to him by the President of Ireland, Catherine Connolly.

In this last couple of years we have been in regular contact with Gabriel on the magazine. During March we were working with him to publish his bilingual sequence of poems, ‘Don Quixote in Search of the Holy Land’. Indeed he was still adding to the sequence during the last weeks before publication, as he felt what he had previously submitted was incomplete. One of the poems he added has in retrospect a certain poignancy:

books! they pile up
is one lifetime long enough
to go through them all?
books!

leabhair! carnaid ar a chéile
an leor saol amháin
chun gabháil tríothu go léir?
leabhair!

The complete sequence came out on 29 March and might be the last work of his to be published (to read it, click here). 

Previously, we had collaborated with him on a series of poems responding to the paintings of another great Irish writer, George William Russell (AE) (click here). Last year he also wrote a review of K. Ramesh’s book of haikus spinning pinwheels (click here). We were struck by how he adopted a ‘conciseness-of-haiku’ format for his review that perfectly mirrored the subject. We were also impressed by his introductory videos to haiku (see links in the article) in which he shared his whole-hearted passion for the form.

We never met him in person but his devotion to poetry shone through his work. We were moved to read his family’s statement, recorded in his obituary in the Irish Independent [/] that ‘He believed in the power of poetry and in its ability to build bridges between different cultures.’ In the same article he was also quoted as saying:

Life makes no sense to me until I begin to write about it. It’s only then that flashes of wit or insights occur to me about what is happening at that moment. And what is happening at that moment will never occur again.

Perhaps it is this approach to life that enabled him to bring his own distinctive point of view to the world and our magazine. We will greatly miss him.

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The text of this article has a Creative Commons Licence BY-NC-ND 4.0 [/]. We are not able to give permission for reproduction of the illustrations; details of their sources are given in the captions.