Massey Bros. in The Sunday Business Post
We were delighted to be featured in yesterday’s Business Post. Susan Guinan and Mary Cunniffe were interviewed on the major shifts in the funeral industry and how pre-planning a funeral can remove stress for a family.
“Massey Bros has partnered with My Farewell Wishes, an Irish company, to offer funeral pre-planning services, which allows clients to register their wishes, document their arrangements and make payments towards their own funeral costs.
Cunniffe has led this new service for Massey Bros as it’s an area in which she has significant experience, having previously worked for a British firm that offered pre-planned funeral services in the Irish market.
“We’ve been trying to raise awareness of the service also by hosting a number of events that we’ve called ‘Courageous Conversations’. I’ve organised two of these events around Dublin so far to get people into a room and give them an insight into this new service we were offering with My Farewell Wishes. And we’ve a third coming up at the end of this month,” Cunniffe says.
She believes the pandemic has made it more acceptable for people to talk about their own death and has removed some of the stigma that Irish people traditionally had when discussing their own mortality.
“It isn’t the taboo subject that it once was even 10 years ago,” Cunniffe says.
Aside from making clear their final wishes, Guinan believes this new service also helps families take the stress out of planning a funeral.
“What we’re seeing is that more people want to record their exact wishes, particularly since they’ve moved away from the church. Some clients are quite specific about what they want. There’s great peace of mind in it for clients, we think. They record what they want, and they can put it out of their mind for another 10 or 20 years,” she says.
