Deep, dazed silence fills air as four crash victims buried, writes KATHY SHERIDANin Buncrana
AS MOURNERS accompanied Paul Doherty on his last journey the few yards from St Mary’s Church in Clonmany to his grave, an ambulance crew was tending to another young man who had collapsed, hitting his head off the pavement only a few yards away.
In a community still numbed and muted, and by now, exhausted, it was hardly surprising.
A remarkable aspect of Inishowen’s public grieving has been the absence – at least in public – of anguished sobs. There is only a deep, dazed silence.
Paul Doherty’s was the first of four funerals on Donegal’s Inishowen Peninsula yesterday, the seventh in two relentless days.
Images evoked of exuberant, vibrant young lads, full of fun and mischief, wild for craic and mad for cars, enjoying a few drinks in The High Stool in Clonmany and following country singer, Mike Denver, around the venues, contrast surreally with the ritual, the incense, the musical laments and the finality of the fresh-scented earth piled on to yet another grave.
With each funeral and each fresh wave of grief come the same young, pinched, wan faces above unnatural black suits and ties, the same musicians, the same football team, the same readings from the Book of Wisdom – “Their going looked like a disaster, their leaving us like annihilation . . ”
The limits of human endurance are daily stretched by people such as Felix and Sally Doherty, who were present at Ciarán Sweeney’s funeral only hours after burying their own son, Paul, on what would have been his 20th birthday, in the same graveyard.
The constant thought for others’ calvary is evident in the words of people like Éamon and Claire Sweeney, who used their reflection time to send out the message that they were holding no-one responsible in any way, for the loss of their “beautiful son and brother”.
And there are the worn-out priests – some of whom were at the crash site on Sunday night – seeking to reassure their congregations and to beg them to change their behaviour.
Fr Fintan Diggin was at pains to assure the bereaved that the consensus of all those who had attended the scene was that the victims had died instantly and painlessly.
Fr John Walsh begged his young listeners to remember they were not “indestructible at the age of 22: “You are very fragile. All of us are . . . When I was your age I too felt indestructible. But none of us is . . .”
“So please, please live life on its terms, within its rules and boundaries; otherwise life will be cruel and merciless towards you and towards the family and friends who will have to bear you to the grave,” he said.