OVER 400 people attended the removal last night of the remains of retired farmer Tom Casey (68), the first victim to die during the recent raids on elderly people living in rural areas.
His neighbours provided a guard, of honour as the cortege left the grounds of University College Hospital, Galway, in a bitter, cold "wind, and made its way six miles to his home village of Oranmore.
The hearse stopped momentarily outside his old, rundown farmhouse where he met such a horrific end at the hands of a gang who, contrary to many indications, appeared to believe he had money.
Among the attendance in the Church of the Immaculate Conception were those who never spoke to him and only knew him as "the man with the wheelbarrow" who went into the village to shop and wheeled home provisions. Also, there were his neighbours who regularly hung bags of food on his front door even though he rarely spoke to them.
Many more mourners had neither spoken to him nor knew him to see yet had come as a mark of solidarity with a community which never believed that the attacks they saw on television and in newspaper photographs would come to their locality.
Ia that category was Mr Dan McCarthy, ICMSA Rural Development Committee chairman, who predicted two months ago that someone would die from the increasingly brutal raids in rural areas. "The inevitable tragedy has happened," he said after the service.
Tom Casey's cousins, his closest living relatives, along with the help of his neighbours, carried the coffin to the church where it was received by Father John O'Dwyer PP.