The incomprehensible nature of the deaths of the Dunne family in Co Wexford has led to speculation but no answers, as relatives, mental health experts and the local community struggle to find an explanation, writes Carl O'Brienin Monageer.
Joanne Cooney felt a deep sense of growing panic. It was just after 2pm on Friday of last week and a young couple, Adrian and Ciara Dunne, were choosing coffins at Cooney's funeral directors on Robert Street in New Ross.
It was the most incongruous and disturbing of scenes. Their two daughters, Leanne (five) and Shania (three), shrieked with laughter as they ran amok in the background. Meanwhile, their parents slowly and insistently listed out their funeral wishes in the event of their deaths.
Cooney tried to interject, or distract them, insisting it was ridiculous to think their children would lead anything other than long, healthy lives. Adrian, though, said it was just a precaution.
What if they were killed in a car crash or some freak accident? Money wouldn't be a problem - his life assurance policy would take care of it.
As she began to type up their individual funeral wishes, Cooney's sense of alarm grew deeper.
Adrian and Ciara wanted to be buried in white solid oak coffins, wearing Liverpool jerseys and jeans. They requested the Liverpool anthem You'll Never Walk Alone and a Guns N' Roses cover version of Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven to be played at the funeral. The girls would wear their favourite Dora the Explorer jeans. If their daughters died before the age of six, they would be buried with them. If they died at a later age, they would have two separate coffins with pink lining on the inside.
"If all four of us died together we are to be interred in the new double grave in Boolavogue and no one else is to be ever buried there," the instructions read. "The headstone we require is a black marble headstone and kerbing. The headstone is to be in the shape of a heart, there is to be a Liverpool crest on it, with red and white stones out on it - Liverpool colours."
Just three days later gardaí forced their way into the Dunne family's small local authority bungalow in the village of Monageer, Co Wexford, to find all four members of the family dead.
Initial post-mortem results indicated that Adrian Dunne was hanged, his wife strangled or choked, and their two children suffocated.
Almost a week on and the stunned village of Monageer and a shocked country are still trying to comprehend what could have driven an apparently normal and loving family to plan their own deaths.
The meticulous detail set out in their burial requests shattered any sense that the deaths could have been explained by an impulsive act of filicide, or uncontrolled emotional turmoil.
Their family members say there was no obvious sign of any distress with the family. They spent a few days at the beach in Courtown, Co Wexford, a week ago. They were also planning a trip to the UK to watch Liverpool over the coming months. The last person to speak to them was Adrian's brother Sebastian (18), and they talked about humdrum things such as soccer and relationships "He was slagging me about girlfriends, because I never seem to hold on to them for that long, and we were talking about the results of the matches," Sebastian recalls. "I could hear the two girls in the background. Everything was just normal." The question of whether there was complicity between both parents has painted the tragedy in an even more sinister and perplexing light.
Gardaí have privately wondered how Adrian - who was blind - could have managed to kill his wife and two children on his own. A further source of bafflement is the lack of any sign that Ciara had tried to fight off her husband. Toxicology tests on the bodies, which may take weeks to complete, will help to determine if Ciara or the children had taken sedatives or were drugged prior to their deaths.
A number of theories have been advanced as to what could have triggered the deaths, but they remain just speculation.
Adrian was still raw with grief over the loss of his 30-year-old brother James, who died by suicide a month ago. He had also been grieving the death a year previously of his father Hugh, with whom he had been particularly close.
Ciara Dunne's family, meanwhile, said they had been concerned for her safety and that of her children, suggesting she had been trapped in a relationship where her husband was the dominant figure.
The deaths were also a mystery for the authorities. Social workers in the Health Service Executive (HSE) had no active file on the family as there had never been any indication the children were at risk. Gardaí received the first indication of concern for the children when contacted by Cooney's funeral directors on Friday afternoon last week.
Psychologists and mental health experts struggled this week to come up with any explanation for the deaths, apart from the conclusion that human beings are far more prone to irrational behaviour than we care to acknowledge.
This week three separate inquiries by the Garda, the HSE and the Government were announced into the circumstances surrounding the deaths. These inquiries will seek to establish the facts, determine whether State services could have intervened earlier and how authorities might co-operate in future family crises.
But for all the inquiries and investigation, none of them will ever be able to answer one of the most important questions: what could have driven the Dunne family to embark on such a devastating course of action?
Adrian and Ciara first met through mutual friends when they were studying in Dublin about six years ago. He was completing a journalism training course near Stillorgan, while she was studying childcare.
Adrian (29) had grown up with a hereditary eye condition called congenital cataracts, which affects several members of his family. His two daughters also inherited the visual impairment. In spite of it, he led a very active life, playing a range of sports and working as a DJ in discos and on the local radio.
"They were all treated the same, the children with sight and those without it," his mother, Mary Dunne, said. "It never stood in his way. I used to tell him that he was no different to anyone else - he just had to try harder." At the age of 22, however, he developed glaucoma and lost complete sight in both eyes, a year before he met his wife-to-be.
Ciara O'Brien (24), originally from Burt, Co Donegal, had always wanted to have a large family. She used to joke with friends that she wanted a "football team" if she had the chance.
They quickly became an item and had their two children before marrying in a surprise ceremony on New Year's Eve in 2005.
"They had been planning to get married and then, on New Year's Eve, he woke her at 6.30am to tell her to get dressed in her best clothes," recalls Adrian's sister, Bridget Dunne (32). "He'd secretly organised a church and had told the family the day before . . . She was over the moon." They moved to Donegal for a time, where Adrian worked as a DJ, before returning to Wexford. After applying for a local authority house, they moved into their bungalow in Moine Rua housing estate in the village of Monageer a year-and-a-half ago.
"They were inseparable," says Adrian's sister Bridget. "They went around together like they were one person. They had the children with them all the time. She was like Adrian's eyes.
"She'd light up the room, she was that kind of person . . . If she was leaving the family house, she'd say she wouldn't leave before she got a kiss from Dad. She used to call him 'Daddy'."
While the relationship appeared to be perfectly normal and happy, a contrasting picture began to emerge when Jim McDaid TD spoke out on behalf of the O'Brien family in Co Donegal this week.
"Ciara was a very impressionable young woman. He was a very dominant figure," he told a local radio station.
"Her parents were up and down to Wexford on a number of occasions because of their concerns for their daughter's safety . . . I know her mother Marian was devastated at times and very distraught and would break down in front of friends.
"Every time they went to Wexford they were fobbed off, every time they were told to go away. [ Ciara] had to obey his orders." Neighbours on the Moine Rua housing estate, meanwhile, remembered a quiet couple who kept to themselves.
"Our kids would play with theirs," says one neighbour on the estate.
"They were lovely, sweet little girls, but we didn't see much of the parents. They didn't interfere with anybody." Another local said Adrian was very independent and determined to set up a soccer club, but that he also showed flashes of anger, thumping a table once when something did not go his way.
"I visited them when they moved in, but I didn't see them after that," says the local parish priest, Fr Bill Cosgrave. "People are entitled to live their own lives, after all."
The first serious alarm bells over the Dunne family's well-being began to sound on Friday afternoon last week after they left Cooney's undertakers in New Ross.
Joanne Cooney contacted gardaí to relay her concerns after typing up their funeral instructions. Among all the chilling details, it was the request for Dora the Explorer jeans for the children that caused the undertakers most alarm, according to Adrian's mother Mary Dunne. The jeans were only available for small children.
A detective on duty apparently advised the undertakers to contact Fr Richard Redmond, a priest who knew the family well, while gardaí said they would keep a close watch on the family.
That evening Fr Redmond visited the Dunne family home for two hours, where he discussed his concerns for their well-being. He said later he had been told that the funeral arrangements were just a precautionary measure in case of the family's death.
His concerns were not fully allayed, however, so he asked the local parish priest, Fr Cosgrave, to keep visiting the family over the weekend.
When Fr Cosgrave called to the house on Saturday morning, the door was closed and the blinds were shut.
By that afternoon the HSE was alerted about the case for the first time, almost 24 hours after concerns were first reported to gardaí. A senior HSE official checked up on the family and found there was no record of the children being at risk.
In the absence of an out-of-hours social-work service over the weekend, the official reminded gardaí that their options were to remove the children themselves and bring them to hospital, or contact the Caredoc service for medical emergencies.
(Coincidentally, a public health nurse had called to the Dunne family on the Friday at around midday, as part of a routine developmental check on the children. Over the course of a two-hour meeting, the nurse did not record any concerns about the family.)
While the Child Care Act (1991) provides substantial powers for gardaí to remove children where they are judged to be at an immediate and serious risk, it is a power very rarely used without background information being supplied by social workers.
On Sunday, a Garda patrol car from Ferns drove into the Moine Rua housing estate a number of times to check on the house, but no garda knocked on the door.
By Monday the Garda and social workers planned to visit the house.
Gardaí who arrived on the scene found the blinds still down and no answer at the door. After forcibly entering the house, they found the shocking scene: Adrian Dunne, dead in the hallway, and his wife and two children lying lifeless in the living room.
Dressed in black and numbed with shock, Mary Dunne is sitting in front of a small coal fire at her home near Clonroche, Co Wexford, struggling to comprehend how she lost four family members last weekend.
"I'm devastated, completely heartbroken. I'm trying to put a brave face on it for the rest of the family," she says, as she grips her daughter's hand.
"It was bad enough to lose my son James last month, but now I've lost my son, my daughter-in-law and my two lovely grandchildren. They say you shouldn't have to bury your children - well, you certainly shouldn't have to bury your grandchildren." Their grief is also tinged with anger over what they see as the failure of State authorities to contact them when concerns were first raised on Friday evening. Adrian's sister Bridget says it was an opportunity lost for the family to intervene and potentially avoid the tragedy.
"If they had told us, we'd have gone down to the house and we wouldn't have left for the whole weekend. There's no way we'd have allowed that to happen." Mary remembers hearing about how social services weren't available to help Sharon Grace and her two daughters before they died two years ago. Now, she says, her family has been failed by the same system.
"We've always been an open family here, we talk about everything," says Mary, "but whatever it was, [ Adrian and Ciara] must have felt very alone. I do feel more could have been done. There are still so many unanswered questions."
Sebastian recalls discussing suicide with Adrian at the funeral of their brother James (30), but it was only to firmly rule it out as an option. "He told me that he'd never do anything like that. He said he'd never be able to do it and, anyway, he wouldn't cause even more grief for Mammy."
Some relatives have discussed openly the possibility of a suicide pact between Adrian and Ciara. "I don't think Adrian would have done that on his own, it may have been a joint decision between the two," says his sister Bridget. "There's no way he'd have done it on his own. They were extremely close."
Discussion of the pact, however, has been a source of anger for the O'Brien family, who insist their daughter could not have done such a thing. The plans for burials of the family also threatened to erupt into a dispute, before the two families came to an agreement during the week.
After being waked together in Co Wexford on Thursday night, Ciara and the two girls will be buried in Donegal today. Adrian will be buried locally in Co Wexford at the same time. Their joint request to be buried together will not be fulfilled.
The question of whether State authorities could have done more to protect the family, meanwhile, is an imponderable one.
Should the Garda have intervened earlier? Did they need to wait for more information from health authorities? Were the potential risks facing the family sufficient to merit their immediate placement in care? Could both authorities have communicated better? Could anything have been done to prevent the family's deaths? We are never likely to receive clear or satisfactory answers. If there is any positive to emerge from the last week's awful tragedy, it will be the renewed focus on the need for a better resourced out-of-hours social work service.
The frustration of social workers and gardaí, who are forced to work within a patchy, under-funded system for dealing with emergency care cases that is not available outside office hours, has been growing in recent years.
The shortcomings mean gardaí are regularly being forced to act as de facto social workers with only the most extreme option available to them: taking children immediately into care.
"Apart from Dublin, the rest of the country is left uncovered," says Declan Coogan of the Irish Association of Social Workers.
"We need a proper, national service to be put in place with a separate team to those working during the day."
For now, it seems the shockwaves over the death of the Dunne family will continue to resonate for years around the small village of Monageer and the outlying townlands of Enniscorthy. The community will be forever associated with this most shocking and perplexing of deaths.
Dr Tony Bates, a senior clinical psychologist, suggests the community's feelings of loss will also be accompanied by a deeper loss of trust and safety in the world.
"The world they wake up to everyday, with its normal ups and downs, has become dangerously unpredictable," he says. "The absence of an easy explanation that would help make this tragedy bearable adds enormously to their sense of loss of control."
A memorial service organised by local residents was one way many tried to come to terms with this week's events.
Catherine O'Brien, a neighbour of the Dunnes, spoke of how the deaths have jolted the community.
"Monday morning, the 23rd of April is a day we'll never forget," she said. "So many times we have been asked how we feel. Everyone, from young to old, feels the shock, sadness and disbelief."
As they filed from a memorial service at St Patrick's Church in Monageer during the week, parents gripped their children's hands tightly, while others struggled for ways to tell them of the terrifying events that had taken place in their own village.
"It's difficult enough for adults to comprehend all of this," said one local. "Just how do we ever explain it to our kids?"