McCourt died of skin cancer (Those Florida vacations no good for Irishmen)
He was a clouds in the sky leftist,but he held up a mirror in Ashes rarely equalled with his opening paragraph he let them have both barrels and that alone is rare:
"Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood," . "People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty, the shiftless loquacious father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests, bullying schoolmasters; the English and all the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years."
Unlike modern leftists McCourt had served in the Army and was not a modern pansy.Many in Limerick took him to task claiming that Ashes was a distorted anti Irish attack by a "flash yank".One bought and paid for journalist even wrote a whole book which was a critique of Ashes and an attempt to present a more "quiet man " version of the post imperial free state.The last word though goes to McCourt who modestly said in response to these attacks:

But the part of it he(McCourt) liked best, he said, was hearing "from all those kids who were in my classes."

"At least they knew that when I talked about writing I wasn't just talking through my hat," he said.