Dermot Morgan, TV’s Father Ted, died yesterday after collapsing at a dinner party he was hosting for friends.

The pilot with a fuel problem, who has to choose between crash landing now, on level land, or crossing the mountain hoping to make it to the airport on the far side – that pilot cannot pass the buck by consulting cabin staff or calling a mass meeting of the petrified passengers. He cannot delegate, dither or debate. To do his duty by the people put in his care he must make his move, fly down or fly on, in a lonely exercise of fallible free will. In short, he must act with arbitrary authority if he is to save the plane and its passengers. That is why Aquinas, after Aristotle, says that authority is a service to the people.

Next week will mark the twentieth anniversary of one of Ireland’s most loved actors, Dermot Morgan.

It was a sunny summer’s day in 1996 when I turned up at Dermot Morgan’s flat in south west London.

Dermot Morgan should, by right, be celebrating his 60th birthday tomorrow. But fate has no respect for talent, and so, at the age of just 46, one of the great rowdies of Irish comedy was lost to us.

Representatives of everything he raged against were clustered around his coffin. Church, state, establishment stood awkwardly in the drizzle to pay their respects.

Dermot Morgan became famous in Britain as Father Ted in the surreal Channel 4 comedy series of the same name, about three bizarre priests living on a tiny island off Ireland’s west coast, but in his own country he was known for so much more.

Letter in The Irish Times, 1 April 1998

Fiona Clarke was with her partner Dermot Morgan on the night he went to that great comedy lounge in the sky … There was a bit of a do at 119B St. Margaret’s Road in Twickenham on February 28, 1998. Dermot’s sister, Denise, her husband, Declan, and a couple of friends, Jim Diamond and his wife Chris, had come to the Morgans’ flat in south-west London for supper. Dermot, she remembers, had just finished filming the last episode of Father Ted. So they lit the fire and ordered takeaways and settled in for the night.

When my father died, on February 28th, 1998, I wasn’t with him. He was in London and I was in Blackrock, with my brother and some friends. In my mind he could as easily have popped out for a newspaper and a late-night pint as have collapsed at home in the company of family and friends. I can only assume he died, and that it wasn’t a very sick joke on his part, although I wouldn’t put it past him. He was a brat that way. Since then my relationship with him has become an irresistible detective story, where I keep looking around for the essence of him, discovering more clues. But every time I think I’m getting close to him I realise I’m not. Twenty years on, here’s what I know about the ex-Dermot Morgan, who shuffled off this mortal coil to join his heroes Dr Chapman, Dean Swift, Lenny Bruce and Marty Feldman in the choir invisible.

Since my first son was born in 2015, I have been trying to understand my new role in the absence of my own father, Dermot Morgan, who today will be dead 20 years.

Twenty years on from his death, Dermot Morgan’s place in Ireland’s public consciousness shows no sign of fading.

Father Ted star Dermot Morgan told of how he was looking forward to getting out of the dog collar and possibly returning to the comedy circuit, in an interview given just days before his death yesterday.

The back bar of The Clarence, Dublin’s most fashionable hotel, is a symphony of muted pastel colours and stark furniture. A fire burns cheerily in the grate, despite the May sunlight streaming through the window. There’s nobody here but me at 1.30 on a Friday lunchtime, which is a little alarming for the management (the place is owned by U2) but may be just a symptom of the new Irish Renaissance, in which no cool Dubliner would be so old-fashioned as to go for lunch in a pub. Among the myriad incarnations of the Renaissance (the Shamrock Economy, Boyzone, Mary Robinson, Riverdance, Angela’s Ashes, Irish theme pubs, Ballykissangel, Neil Jordan, The Leenane Trilogy on Broadway) one of the most striking has been the success of Father Ted, the Bafta-winning sitcom whose run came to an abrupt stop after three series.