The deaths of Diarmuid and Lorraine Flood and their children, Julie and Mark, appear to have come without warning, and experts admit that such catastrophic acts can be nearly impossible to predict or explain
For those waiting amid the daffodils and primroses in Cloughbawn parish churchyard in Co Wexford on Thursday evening, that first unexpected sight of a vast, silent throng walking over a sunny distant hill on a country road behind two hearses, each bearing one oak and one white coffin, is one that will linger. The several hundred members of the vast, extended families of Diarmuid and Lorraine Flood were walking their own Via Dolorosa, past the couple's tragic, burnt-out home in Clonroche village, once owned by Diarmuid's grandfather, then along the half mile of pretty winding road to the old church where Lorraine had sung in the choir.
All week, tireless numbers of local volunteers from Clonroche's community development association, soccer and GAA clubs had been quietly doing what Irish country people have always done, in rituals often assumed to have been abandoned in the hedonistic Champagne Charlie years: delivering the endless trays of home-made sandwiches, cake and flasks of tea; digging the graves; preparing the church and the temporary car parks; and easing the unfathomable torment of the bereaved in the only way they could. On Thursday, at least 25 volunteers, friendly, bewildered countrymen in their high visibility vests, helped to man the car parks and church entrance, ensuring an unimpeded path for families and friends.
Nothing had been left to chance for two of the biggest and best-known extended families in the area, as they linked arms and presented a picture of dignity and strength on that country hillside. In other recent cases of familicide (a murder-suicide where a family member kills two or more of his/her family within a 24-hour period), such as in Monageer a year ago, where Adrian and Ciara Dunne were found dead along with their two daughters, or when Arthur McElhill killed his wife and five children in Omagh, both men were pointedly buried separately from their families.
In Wexford this week, it was clear that the two families were determined to present a sense of solidarity in grief and loss. Whatever the terrible final act by a husband and father, God and family would remember the good things he had done, as the carefully-chosen reading at the removal service made clear. They would honour Diarmuid and Lorraine Flood as parents of Mark and Julie and as the loving couple they had known them as for more than 17 years.
However, for many observers, ironically, it simply raised new questions about the last catastrophic act of a man who on a Friday night into Saturday morning, after a family outing to a health and fitness centre in a nearby hotel, took a decision to destroy himself and all that he loved.
The usual facile explanations for such a tragedy simply did not apply here; not the death of community spirit, nor the isolation of a soul-less suburban housing estate, nor secularism, nor a sense of abandonment and frustrated expectations in a free-booting tiger economy. There were no last-minute calls for help to a non-responsive service, nor any apparent distress to indicate that this was a family in crisis.
The Floods appear to have been a popular, outgoing family with no known money worries (they last year drew salaries totalling €102,000 from the family drilling business), relationship difficulties, substance abuse issues or history of mental illness.
Their families were soundly rooted in their own place, hard-working, steeped in a Gaelic tradition of hurling and camogie. The couple appeared to have successfully melded the gentler side of rural Ireland - the Tops of the Town shows, the Strawberry Queen and Rose of Tralee contests - with the affluent trimmings of apparently prosperous business lives, such as foreign holidays, decent cars and membership of the fitness and leisure centre at the Ferrycarrig Hotel.
In fact, the couple and their children had been on a family outing to the Ferrycarrig centre on Friday night, only hours before they died. Plans had been made which suggested that Diarmuid Flood anticipated a normal life in the days ahead at least, and there had been talk of a family holiday in Italy later in the year. Meanwhile, however, he had acquired cartridges for the gun he already had in the house, as well as the flammable liquid used to spread the fire. While both he and Lorraine died from gunshot wounds, the manner of the children's deaths will not be known until toxicology results are returned.
"We've had cases like the Dunne family, or Sharon Grace [who drowned her two small daughters and herself near Wexford town three years ago, following attempts to contact a social worker after hours], and we know that they were in some way in contact with some aspects of the social services," says a local health worker. "We know there were some issues going on there. But this family would have had access to a wider network of structures and supports. You would have expected a higher chance of healthy outcomes . . . "
WITH THE BENEFIT of hindsight, however, there are those who say that while they were invariably referred to as a sociable couple, Lorraine was the outgoing one and Diarmuid was the shyer, more introverted partner. Locals respond brightly to questions about Lorraine, about her beauty, her sense of style and cheerful demeanour - "Ah, she was a tonic . . . she always had something positive to say to you" - and about her involvement in the Development Association, where she alternated between model and compère in the annual fashion show, how she took on the job of PRO with the Parents' Association, her guitar-playing and singing in the church choir, and yoga and Pilates business run from the community centre.
While they talk affectionately about Diarmuid as a "gentleman", there are few spontaneous anecdotes about him, beyond the fact that he walked his children to school in the mornings, that his father and cousins played hurling at county level, though Diarmuid and his brothers never pursued it seriously, and that he joined his father's water-drilling business after school, before taking over as manager.
Meanwhile, Lorraine's life as a young, single woman was a busy social whirl: Tops of the Town competitions and pantomimes; winning the Strawberry Queen title, before appearing as a Rose of Tralee contestant in 1991, where her escort and boyfriend of seven months was Diarmuid Flood. Was she going to marry him, asked Gay Byrne. "Yes, if he asks me," she replied. "After seven months? Does he know you're going to marry him?" "No," she giggled. When the camera panned to the audience, it failed to find Diarmuid. "He's too shy," she said.
"He absolutely adored her, that's for definite," said a local man, before adding after a long pause, "though you could always turn that around I suppose and say that if you're going to go yourself, maybe you want to take that thing you adored with you. The real fear is of that attitude, 'If I'm going, she's going too' . . . It's a strange thing to say, but I hope it was just depression."
While such horrors cry out for explanation, there may be no explanation, just as there are few answers in any kind of suicide.
In June of last year in San Francisco, when Kevin Morrissey, 51, parked his car in Tilden Park and killed his two children, his wife and then himself, it was ascribed to "money problems" and so-called experts on familicide said that Morrissey fitted the profile. But Douglas Levinson, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, cautioned against rushing to judgment on what motivated Morrissey. "It's incredibly harmful to people who are kind of like this guy and may think their family is similar," he told the San Francisco Chronicle. "These extreme family tragedies are very rare and can't be explained by the ordinary issues and stresses that most of us face in our daily lives."
Levinson said a murder-suicide scenario within a family is uncommon because most people who are capable of homicide won't kill themselves, and the majority of people who die suicide are not homicidal. The possibilities as to what drove Morrissey, Levinson concluded, "could be all of the above or none. We just don't know."
While familicide appears to require a category to itself, particularly in light of an apparent spate of such tragedies in recent years, it is so rare that it fails to rate a mention in a recent wide-ranging, reflective, straight-talking report on suicide in Ireland by Dr Dermot Walsh at the Health Research Board.
The volatility of suicide rates in general is evident in Dr Walsh's summary of trends over the past 150 years, showing a rise until the first World War, then some decline up to 1970, then a moderate but steady increase, which greatly accelerated in the 1990s.
DESPITE THE PUBLIC perception, however, suicide numbers have been falling. They declined by 20 per cent between 1998 and 2006; in that time, male suicides alone fell by 115 deaths from 433 to 318.
Data from 2005, dealing with 25 countries of the enlarged EU, places Ireland in "17th place at 12.4 deaths per 100,000 population of all ages". Why? Dermot Walsh, whose expertise encompasses suicide from ancient Greece to the present day, says straightforwardly that he does not know.
Drug abuse, mental disorders, revenge or outwardly-directed aggression or alcohol may all be implicated in individual cases. The question is, how to identify those few individuals who might take their own lives as a result?
Walsh recalls a case of "outwardly directed aggression" from 50 years ago, involving a married, working-class man, who had led "a fairly reckless life towards alcohol and toward his wife". One day, his wife came home and found the door was bolted on the inside, so she and a friend got a ladder and managed to look in the window. He had killed himself, which was a shock, as was his note: "Dear Mary, I hate you and I'm going to come back and haunt you."
"The trouble is that suicide is still . . . a rare event and the risk factors are all common," Walsh says in his report, quoting a 1997 study, which stated: "There is no single, readily identifiable, high-risk population that constitutes a sizeable proportion of overall suicides and yet represents a small, easily targeted group." In Ireland in 2000, he adds, 109 of 641,522 persons in the age group 15-24 killed themselves. In individual prevention terms, the task would have been to identify the 0.16 per cent of this age group who subsequently died by suicide.
Even such highly vulnerable groups as those suffering from depression (a lifetime incidence of 15 per cent) or schizophrenia (an annual incidence of 15 per 100,000) are virtually unreadable in this context. On these figures, we might expect 660 suicides alone from these two causes every year, he says, but this would exceed by 200 the total number of suicides here per year. "Now," he says, "the task is to identify within these groups those who will kill themselves."
His scepticism towards the multiplicity of reports and pat answers to suicide is palpable.
"There have been a number of reports in Ireland and elsewhere making recommendations on actions to reduce suicide and deliberate self-harm. Most are politically convenient but scientifically fallible. Generally, they rely on generic improvement in social, educational and medical provision but are short on specifics, not surprising given the lack of evidence for any single intervention. The one measure with potential for influence, the reduction of alcohol consumption through mechanisms recommended by a national task force, remains largely unimplemented."
STUDIES FROM THE 1980s and 1990s that attempted to address the phenomenon of young male suicide came up with a slew of answers that included an increase in unemployment.
"While some of these indices undoubtedly reflect greatly changed Irish mores, others are more debatable . . . Why increased secularisation should differentially increase suicide in young males remains to be explained. As explanation, one can invoke greater young male vulnerability to stress and greater uncertainty as to life's purposes and goals . . . However, as with all such speculations, understanding is not much advanced as these considerations are not unique to Irish male youth. In truth, we are as unable to satisfactorily answer why young male suicide rose to 1998 as to explain why it has been falling since."
While the reasons behind such a frightening phenomenon remain stubbornly elusive, the answers to an individual tragedy as seen in Clonroche must be all the more so.