Church prepares for huge crowd at family removal

SPECIAL arrangements have been made at St Clement’s Church in Clonroche to accommodate huge crowds expected to attend tonight’s removal of the Flood family.

The tiny church is preparing to receive the bodies of all four family members who died in last weekend’s murder suicide after it was confirmed they will be buried on Friday afternoon — exactly one week since they were last seen alive.

Yesterday, their bodies arrived at a house in Clonroche and they will be brought directly to St Clement’s Church at 7pm this evening.

Cloughbawn parish priest Fr Richard Hayes said the church will be full with a large number of relatives, visiting clergy and public representatives.

Loudspeakers were erected yesterday and seats will be placed outside to cater for the many friends of the popular couple.

In the early hours of Saturday morning, Diarmuid Flood murdered his wife, Lorraine, and their two children Mark, 6, and, Julie, 5, before shooting himself. Before he died he started a fire that destroyed most of the house.

Postmortems were delayed by the discovery of asbestos on the site and the need for blood tests to find out if the Flood children were drugged or smothered.

The Floods’ bodies were finally released on Tuesday night after north Wexford coroner Dr Sean Nixon sanctioned the move.

It has emerged how relations on both sides of the family turned to their strong religious faith as they waited for the state pathologist’s office to finish its work.

Tonight will be the third time this week the combined Flood and Kehoe families have gathered to pray for the dead.

On Sunday, Lorraine’s parents Jim and Kathleen Kehoe hosted a mass in their family home.

The following night Diarmuid’s parents Sean and Kathleen Flood held another prayer service.

They will be together again on Friday when the Flood family are buried in the cemetery to the rear of St Clement’s church.

It is a graveyard that carries the reminders of other horrors that have cast a shadow over the tiny village.

Close to the Floods’ plot lies the grave of the last child murdered in Clonroche in November 1970.

Then nine-year-old Marie Buckley was sexually assaulted and beaten to death by a local man just a short distance from the Floods’ home.

At the time the entire village searched for her body and many people still living in the area gave evidence at the trial of Clonroche man William Whitmore. A jury found him guilty of murder.

Meanwhile, as St Clement’s prepared for Friday’s funeral mass, gardaí continued their investigations at the house where the family died.

Construction experts examined the shell of the house and declared it safe for forensic experts to enter and sift through the rubble for clues as to why Mr Flood decided to kill himself and his family.