AN AMERICAN WOMAN whose Irish husband ended his and their three-year-old daughter’s life by walking in to the sea has spoken of her relief at being granted permission to exhume the remains of her child for burial in her native country.

Rebecca Saunders posted on her Twitter account ‘Clarissa’s Cause’ about the development.

Today I was granted the licence to exhume Clarissa. After nine years I will be able to take Rissa home! This has been a really long time coming. It’s a day for celebration. A heartfelt thank you to everyone who has helped to shape this in to reality. 

In April of last year, Ms Saunders met a fundraising target to have the remains of her child exhumed and transferred to the US for burial.

Rebecca Saunders tweeted “we’ve done it – thank you” as her GoFundMe page hit its €42,000 target following a huge reaction to her appearance on RTÉ’s Claire Byrne Live. 

Ms Saunders, who lives in Houston in Texas, says nine years ago “in a fog of grief and shock” she permitted her child Clarissa to be buried “with the father she loved, but who took her life from her”.

Rebecca was just 26 years old when her husband Martin (50) drowned their daughter Clarissa McCarthy at Audley Cove in West Cork on 5 March 2013.

Three days later father and daughter shared a single coffin at a requiem mass at St Mary’s Church in Schull. They were laid to rest in an adjacent graveyard.

All funds not used in the process to exhume Clarissa will equally be donated to Edel House in Cork which supports victims of domestic violence and Cork University Maternity Hospital Neonatal Unit.

Rebecca said that when tragedy struck she believed that Martin had taken a snap decision. However, subsequent information indicated that there was a degree of planning to his actions.

“I really can’t say that I feel I will ever be able to forgive him. I feel like he used his daughter as a sword to stab me in the heart with. And I think that is very, very wrong.

I think that the expectation that I had that I bury Clarissa so quickly was… It just wasn’t fair. Clarissa and her father died on a Tuesday and they were buried on a Friday.

“In that small space of time I had to decide what happened to this little girl who was my world.

“The first thought that struck me in the shock that I was in was that I didn’t want her to be alone. At the time I didn’t know just how planned out Martin had gone.

“The totality of the steps he took to ensure that if it wasn’t that day he had the steps in place to carry out his end game another day.”

The breakdown of Rebecca’s relationship with Martin began six months after their marriage in the summer of 2006. The pair met when she was a teenager and studying in Ireland.

Rebecca says her husband got in to legal battles over land and became fixated on them.

She felt that family life was non-existent as Martin was ‘obsessed’ with his legal issues and his work as a farmer. Rebecca says she and Clarissa were “forgotten about”.

Rebecca and Martin sought marriage counselling and made every effort to turn their relationship around. On the night of the tragedy Rebecca had arranged to meet someone to talk about accessing legal aid to end her marriage.

She told Martin she was going to dinner with a friend. The pair had discussed the disintegration of their relationship and Rebecca had brought up the subject of divorce.

Poignantly, Rebecca says that some of her happiest times with Clarissa were on the beach where she drowned.

Rebecca, who has remarried and has two children, says that she is trying to learn to live with the tragic loss of her first born. She wants to live and not allow the tragedy to “consume her.”

An inquest in to the deaths in 2014 heard from Assistant State Pathologist, Dr Margaret Bolster who said that both McCarthy, who was found to have a blood alcohol concentration of 204mgs per 100ml, and Clarissa, had died from acute cardio respiratory failure due to drowning. She found no evidence of physical restraint.

Coroner for West Cork Frank O’Connell returned verdicts that both McCarthy and Clarissa died from cardio-respiratory failure due to drowning and that in the case of McCarthy it was self-inflicted while in the case of Clarissa, she was taken into the water, became unconscious and drowned.

The inquest in Bantry, Co Cork heard that a major land and sea search was launched for the duo when a note addressed to Rebecca was discovered in the milking parlour on 5 March. The note was in McCarthy’s handwriting.

Mr O’Connell, who read the note, said it was clear why serious concerns over the safety of the duo were raised as the farmer was “explicit” in the note about his intentions.

The inquest was contentious. It became heated when Mr O’Connell said that McCarthy may have held his daughter under water, with some objections from persons present.

McCarthy had changed his will before his death and excluded his wife from inheriting major assets.