THE ROAD THAT leads to St Mary’s Church, Castlerahan, looks like no one has driven along it in decades. Stone-walled ruins and picturesque cottages are dotted along either side of the road which is barely more than one-car wide.
Eventually, the route’s overgrown ditches open up into a small clearing, busy with cars, ushers and people.
The crunching sound of feet on gravel fills the air as the crowds make their way to the small and ancient church to say farewell to the Hawe family.
Brothers Liam, Niall, and Ryan, who attended the primary school across the road from the church where their funeral will be held. Parents Alan and Clodagh, pillars of the community and local teachers who were married for 15 years.
Students in navy school jumpers hug each other’s waists, and altar assistants, some of whom went to school with Liam, wait patiently outside the church, which is surrounded by evergreen trees and hundreds of mourners.
The hearses arrive by garda escort along the winding road. As the hearse carrying Liam’s coffin makes its way through the church gates, it stalls, and after five minutes it still won’t start.
While four men in white shirts carry Liam’s coffin up from outside the church gate, we’re reminded that the scale of this tragedy is almost too great for the community to bear. The four hearses barely fit around the church’s grounds.
Earlier that day, a newly-wed bride walked down the aisle with her husband – hours later a mother’s coffin is carried up that same aisle and placed in front of the church altar: side-by-side with her three sons and her husband.
Family members place items on the children’s coffins: a basketball on Liam’s, a sporting trophy on Niall’s, and on the youngest, Ryan’s, a “woolly dog with appealing eyes”.
Father Felim Kelly, a close friend of Alan’s, addressed the confusion and disbelief that the church teeming with mourners were dealing with:
We all are trying to cope with a tragedy beyond our understanding.
Throughout the requiem mass, students, colleagues, family and friends call for prayer, love, and strength. Members of the Ballyjamesduff community listen in through the doors of the church and to the outside speaker. Elderly men with their hands in their pockets, heads hung deep in thought; daughters holding their mothers’ hands.
After the funeral, the congregation inside the church merged with those listening outside and followed the coffins being carried to the adjoining graveyard.
They form a giant square around the Hawe’s final resting place.
Husbands hugged their wives close to them, while men in suits lowered the coffins into the ground. A boy cries while his father pulls his hood around his head, to protect him from the threatening sky.
Five doves are released from a basket and disappear over the treeline, while the priest asked the congregation to join him in prayer:
“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…”
As the community make their way home, driving their cars back down that small rural road, the heavens open up and the clouds that had seemed so threatening before broke their silence, covering Ballyjamesduff in a blinding rain and mist.
The awful truth of this terrible tragedy is that we may never know why this family of five, pillars of the community, salt of the earth people, are gone.
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