Portaferry Says Goodbye to Ciara Mageean

Ciara Mageean, the 2024 European 1,500m champion, died on Sunday, Nov. 1, at the age of 34, after living with stage four bowel cancer since 2025. Marathon Handbook reported her death that morning, along with the wedding she celebrated a week before it. On Tuesday her funeral was held in Portaferry, Co. Down, the town where she grew up and where, mourners were told, she had asked for it to be.

Hundreds walked behind the cortege as it made the short journey from the family home to St. Patrick’s Church. Young players from Portaferry GAC, the club where Mageean played camogie as a girl, lined the way as a guard of honor, standing alongside her husband, Thomas “Tommy” Moran, and her family as the coffin was carried into the churchyard. An Irish tricolor and an Olympic flag were held up as it passed.

The mourners included Stormont First Minister Michelle O’Neill, SDLP leader Claire Hanna, GAA president Jarlath Burns and the Olympic gymnastics champion Rhys McClenaghan, according to the PA news agency. Aides represented President Catherine Connolly and Taoiseach Micheál Martin, and TheJournal.ie reported that the boxer Michaela Walsh and Mary Peters, Northern Ireland’s 1972 Olympic champion, were also there.

The homily was given by Fr. Martin Kelly, now 85, who was parish priest at St. Patrick’s from 2000 to 2009 and had known Mageean since she was eight. He spoke first about the wedding. Mageean and Moran married at Belfast City Hall in October and held a second celebration at Darver Castle in Co. Louth on Oct. 25. “There were two events for her wedding and she looked radiant at both of them, at the centre of each event, and I saw her dancing and singing, so full of joy and so happy to be able to celebrate her big day with Tommy,” Kelly said.

“She was determined to give everybody a day to remember. After the second celebration she retired to her hospice bed and that was it, she sank lower and lower, but she held out until last Sunday just passed, the Feast of All Saints. What an appropriate day.”

Turning to Moran, he said: “You were the love of her life.”

Kelly also told the congregation about a visit to the hospice a few weeks before she died. Mageean, he said, perked up and suggested they go for a walk, and he expected to keep up with her easily. “We did a round of a few streets up round the hospice and when we got to the top she said ‘let’s do another round’. I nearly collapsed.” On the way back, seeing him struggle, she offered him her arm.

He remembered Rome as well, and the 2024 European final, when Mageean found herself boxed in on the home straight. As Kelly told it, she said to herself: “you’re not going to box in a Portaferry camogie player that easily.”

Mageean is survived by Moran, her parents, Christopher and Catherine, her sisters, Máire and Nuala, and her brother, Brendan.

“One of my happiest moments and memories is that of Ciara Mageean linking my arm as we walked back to her room, just a few weeks before she went to heaven,” Kelly said. “Thank you Ciara from the bottom of my heart.”