John Clarke, husband of the late Marian Finucane, has died aged 88.
A figure who remained largely in the background during Ms Finucane's broadcasting career in RTÉ, Mr Clarke stepped into the public light in the years following her unexpected death in January 2020.
At her funeral in 2020, he described her as "my Marian, the woman I loved for 40 years" who "made the colours brighter, the world a bit easier to live in".
Mr Clarke was born in Dublin on 2 August 1936, and married Ms Finucane in 2015 after more than 30 years together.
During his career, he had a wide range of business interests, including running the Irish International advertising agency for 20 years and was involved in property.
The couple first bought a farm in Co Westmeath, before settling down in Co Kildare.
He had three sons from this first marriage, Jocelyn, Neil and Timothy, and then he and Ms Finucane went on to have two children, Sinéad and Jack.
Tragically, Sinéad died aged eight from leukemia in 1990.
"After a couple of meetings, I realised she was the only person I ever wanted to see. We shared an insatiable curiosity about the wider world and how it worked."
The couple first met when Ms Finucane was 20 years old, and he was 14 years her senior.
The attraction, he said, was "powerful" but she was young and he was married with three young sons at the time, so they agreed to go their separate ways.
When they subsequently met again some years later, both of them left their marriages to set up home together.
"There was this mad chemistry that pulled us together," he explained.
The couple had just returned from holiday in India when he found her dead in bed on 2 January 2020.
Mr Clarke's searing honesty about their love affair, the depth of their bond throughout their decades long relationship and his profound admiration for her both as a mother and an intellectual was evident in the interviews he gave after her death.
He wrote a memoir called 'Finucane & Me: My Life with Marian' in 2023 and featured in an RTÉ documentary called 'Marian'.
He is survived by his four sons and extended family.
