Patrick (Paddy) Aloysius Moran, a long-time resident of Truro, died peacefully in North Bay, Ontario, on October 13 following a brief hospitalisation. He was 87.
Paddy was born in 1924 in Dublin, Ireland, on March 17, the feast day of his and his country’s patron saint, and grew up in Taughmon, County Westmeath, Ireland. As a young man, he travelled extensively throughout Ireland, reporting for Irish newspapers and working with the Irish community development organisation, Muintir Na Tíre.
With his wife, Maire, he emigrated to Canada in 1955, settling first in Toronto, then Edmonton and Ottawa. Among other jobs, he worked as a fundraiser for the Catholic church and in the co-operative and credit union movements.
In 1968, with a family of five pre-teenage children, Paddy and Maire moved to Lesotho, a recently independent country in southern Africa. For the next four years, he worked as a co-ops extension officer for the Lesotho Ministry of Agriculture, helping farmers and craftspeople form marketing co-ops to improve the income they earned from their labours. It was a job he always said was the highlight of his professional career.
Returning to Canada in 1973, Paddy worked as an agricultural market development officer in Prince Edward Island before being appointed editor of the Atlantic Co-operator, a monthly newspaper that covered the co-op movement across the Maritimes and a job that combined two of his life-long passions, co-ops and writing. Working out of Antigonish, he lived in Truro from 1978 until 2007.
Paddy was for many years Atlantic director of the Canadian Executive Service Organisation, a not-for-profit group that places volunteers, usually retired business executives, with development projects in Canadian Aboriginal communities and abroad. In his retirement, he continued to contribute to the co-op movement, providing consulting services to, and acting as trustee for, several co-ops across Nova Scotia.
A voracious reader, researcher and letter-writer, Paddy had a worldwide network of correspondents who were regularly delighted by his long letters, the most common feature of which was exhaustively researched details of the lives of members of shared family trees.
Paddy was predeceased by his wife, Maire (Heeran), and his eldest daughter, Mary. He is survived by a sister, Fiona Gillsenan, Crossakiel, Meath, Ireland; two sons, Pat, Toronto, and Francis (Linda), Ottawa; two daughters, Helen Weaver (Bob), South River, Ontario, and Anna (David Chan), Stillwater Lake, Nova Scotia; and 10 grandchildren, Tunde, Meg, Laura, Ali, Christopher, Brendan, Julian, Bernadette, Fiona and DJ.
Following Maire’s death in 2004, Paddy moved to North Bay to be closer to family members. He died on what would have been his and Maire’s 57th wedding anniversary. A funeral service was held at Saint Augustine’s Roman Catholic Church in South River, Ontario, on Monday, October 17, followed by burial, beside his wife, in the Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Cemetery in Trout Creek, Ontario.
If desired, memorial donations to Toronto’s Covenant House would be sincerely appreciated by the family.