AS SUMMER rain lashed Donegal’s Inishowen Peninsula, Hugh Friel, “a lovely, quiet, pleasant gentleman” who was “easy pleased”, was laid to rest in Urris cemetery, high in the misty Racthan Hills, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
The funeral of the 66-year-old farmer and bingo enthusiast was the first of eight to be endured over three days by a small community, dazed and muted with grief.
Among the mourners in Urris were members of the McEleney, Doherty and Sweeney families, who will bury their own dead today and tomorrow. Others struggled with the logistics of getting to the funeral Mass of Mark McLaughlin (21) an hour later in Fahan.
His friend, PJ McLaughlin (21), would be buried from the same church at 3pm, by the same priest, Fr Neil McGoldrick. Today many of the same mourners will try to make it to four more.
It is easy to spot the “wake houses” in an area that maintains the tradition of waking the dead for two nights, before taking them directly from home for the funeral Mass. Processions of pale, hollow-eyed young men pulling on new black ties. Hastily cobbled signs in deep countryside directing visitors to parking areas. The roads around Fahan, lined for miles with the cars of those paying their respects to the families of the McLaughlin boys.
At yesterday’s three funerals, where mourners filled the churches well before the appointed hour, there were no lengthy eulogies or loud scenes of grieving. There were only short, simple reflections and prayers for the other grieving families and for the young driver, Shaun Kelly – fighting for his life in intensive care – and desolate tears coursing silently down young faces.
If there was a common theme, it was an implied attachment to road vehicles of some kind.
“Hughie always kept a lovely shiny car… spick and span,” noted a neighbour of Hugh Friel. At Mark McLaughlin’s Mass, Peggy Doherty recited a poem about his devotion to eight-wheeler trucks. It ended: “You’d meet him coming anywhere and even day or night, His mobile phone to his ears, he’d wave and flash the lights. A lovely happy lad he was, but God had another plan. So proudly now we say farewell to our driving gentleman.”
The offertory gifts to mark PJ McLaughlin's short, full life included a photograph of an old souped-up BMW and a star-shaped trophy naming him "Driver of the Year 2010". They also included a football shirt for a club poignantly represented in the guard of honour for his arrival at the church and his final journey to the nearby graveyard, from where the strains of The Fields of Athenrydrifted back towards the church yard.
Hughie Friel’s offertory gifts were a cloth cap and a bingo card, along with recollections of neighbourliness and a generation steeped in the tradition of the meitheal. In a reference to the circumstances of his death, Fr Fintan Diggin said: “I’m sure he’d have used the phrase you hear so much these days – there but for the grace of God go I.”
