TV architect Dermot Bannon has told of anger when his father died from a heart attack aged 68.
The Dubliner said his loss was compounded as he passed away just two years after his own daughter had been born.
The host of RTE’s Room To Improve admitted he hadn’t realised how ill his father was when he was rushed to Beaumont Hospital in 2007.
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Dermot added: “We knew he was gravely ill in the last couple of days but we were waiting for him to pull through. It was a huge shock.
“That was my first real kind of jolt in life. And it is something that is irreversible.
“My father’s death, for me, was a cruel realisation of what life is like, that it does end.”
Meanwhile Dermot revealed how witnessing grinding poverty as a kid made him realise the importance of having a home.
Dermot was nine when he and his family moved from Dublin to Cairo, Egypt, where his dad worked as a horticulturalist.
He recalled: “There was a part of the city with old tombs and mausoleums that rich people had built.
“And there weren’t that many people going visiting the graves or tombs.
“Families used to move into them. They were living in somebody’s grave. That’s how poor people were. Being exposed to that at a young age made me appreciate things a lot more.”
Dermot said he was further moved by a fire that broke out in an area of Cairo where kids he knew were living under cardboard.
He added: “I still remember the shock and trauma of seeing the fire and thinking, ‘What’s happened, are they OK?’.
“Fundamentally, for me, a house was shelter. It was protection.”
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