Family, friends, and classmates bid final farewell to drowning victim Christopher

From early morning they started to come — families, older people and, especially, the young. And the most striking thing about the place was the silence, broken only by birdsong and cars going by in the bright June sunshine.

Inside the church, mourners knelt in quiet prayer for a 17-year-old whose tragic passing numbed a close community. In the words of a priest, they were “toiling with a multitude of questions and failing miserably to discover reasonable answers’’.

Christopher O’Sullivan’s short life ebbed away after he got into difficulties while swimming in the River Blackwater, near Knocknagree, Co Cork, on Sunday evening. Yesterday, he was laid to rest in his native Rathmore, Co Kerry.