‘We will never know why Lara took her life’

So many questions, so few answers, as Lara Burns Gibbs, the 12-year-old who took her own life on Saturday, was yesterday laid to rest in Maynooth amid scenes of grief and bewilderment.

This was the very worst type of school assembly. St Mary’s Church began to fill from the back, those rows reserved for pupils from Maynooth Post Primary School, where Lara was a first-year student.

Many of her friends and classmates were reduced to tears by the time her white coffin — chosen by older brother Brendan — was carried through the church. Then came her family, including her mother Helene, father Robert, and stepfather Noel, as well as cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, some almost doubled over in anguish.