Final journey in Liverpool tops and Dora the Explorer jeans

THEY were to be buried in their Liverpool tops and new Dora The Explorer denim jeans, little Leanne and Shania Dunne, in white coffins with pink stripes.

According to Adrian Dunne’s mother, Mary, these wishes for Adrian and Ciara’s daughters, and for their own funeral, were communicated to an undertaker last Friday in New Ross, prompting immediate suspicion.

The couple wanted four coffins to be buried in a plot in the cemetery in Boolavogue.

Despite the gardaí being alerted to these wishes on Friday, and the Health Service Executive on Saturday, they and their daughters ended up dead, their bodies discovered by gardaí just before 2pm on Monday.

Within minutes, rumours were sweeping around their adoptive village of Monageer as well as nearby Enniscorthy and Clonroche, while outside in Forstalstown, in a remote house down a narrow country boreen, Mary Dunne sat waiting for news.

Having lost another son, James, just over three weeks before, she couldn’t believe that another had also gone, but this time, along with his wife and two small daughters.

“I couldn’t believe it was happening again,” Ms Dunne said yesterday.

“I’m after burying one son and now Adrian.”

She said that the couple wanted to arrange everything themselves. “They had everything planned for the funeral.”

The Moine Rua Estate was quiet yesterday, the house at the end of the cul de sac which was home to the Dunnes since last summer empty following the removal of the bodies in four coffins on Monday night.

The crime scene tape was still there, and the site manned by gardaí throughout the day. Media personnel kept up a long vigil, but family members stayed at home to grieve. Ciara Dunne’s parents, PJ and Marian O’Brien, were on their way down from Donegal to deal with the grim realities of funeral arrangements and to confront their daughter’s final wishes.

On Monday, it seemed that Adrian Dunne had killed his family and then killed himself, but throughout yesterday it emerged that he had been accompanied to the funeral directors in New Ross on Friday by Ciara, and that they had both been involved in trying to make arrangements.

All at odds with their family’s impressions during the days before the tragedy. Adrian’s sister Bridget spoke with him 10 days ago and said that he was “grand” and discussing arrangements to place anniversary notices in the local newspapers, marking a year since the death of their father.

Bridget took Monday off work, not feeling well, and spent time trying to compose a message for their brother James’s month’s mind mass, due to take place this Sunday, April 29.

As she spoke about her brother’s death, and those of his young family, she was reduced to silence as she contemplated the tragedies of the last year. An anniversary, a month’s mind and now four funerals.