Community takes O’Driscoll family into its embrace

The school commute from Charleville to Banogue National School took in a chilling new sight on a balmy autumn morning.

On their way to school, children saw their friends Paddy and Thomas’s house in Deerpark, to the north of Charleville on the main Cork-Limerick road, tied up in blue and white crime scene tape, surrounded by garda cars.

Outside the rural school, parents discussed how best to explain to their sons and daughters why there are now two empty desks in their classroom.

One parent, Aidan Ryan, recalled two “rogues and loveable tearaways”.

“It’s just devastating. You’re just trying to explain to kids the unexplainable. It’s very, very difficult. I have a boy and a girl a class above and a class below the two lads. They were playing with them here after school yesterday. You just tell them to pray for them, think of their mum and dad. They’ve lost friends, but the mum and dad have lost three sons and the other kids in the family have lost three brothers, so we just have to think of the family this morning,” he said.

Helen and Thomas O’Driscoll and their family stayed with nearby relatives in the town as their home remained sealed off for forensic analysis.

At 10am Father Tom Naughton held a special Mass in memory of the three O’Driscoll boys.

“There was a lovely crowd at the Mass this morning, where we mentioned the lads. It was particularly uplifting in that there were lots of young people from the various schools in the parish there to show their support and condolences,” Fr Naughton said after the service.

Back at Deerpark, a large crowd of family and friends gathered in the grass verge and hard shoulder at the roadside by the O’Driscoll home as deputy state pathologist Dr Michael Curtis arrived at 11am to carry out preliminary examinations on the bodies of Paddy and Thomas.

Just after noon the hearses carrying the remains of the twin brothers pulled out of their home and out onto the main N22 Cork to Limerick road.

The mourners surged out on to the road, surrounding the second hearse while the boys’ father beckoned the first, which had already travelled a couple of dozen meters up the road, to reverse and rejoin the makeshift congregation. With gardaí marshalling traffic either side, Fr Naughton led a prayer service, with heads bowed in the middle of the road, with a decade of the rosary.

Many, including the boys’ parents, leaned on the hearses — a gesture that showed that support was there both for the boys and for the heartbroken loved ones left in their wake.

Once prayers finished and the crowd moved to the side of the road, the busy traffic flow resumed and the hearses began their journey to Cork University Hospital, where the postmortem on their remains took place yesterday afternoon.

Back on Charleville’s main street, the numb terror that initially met the tragedy on Thursday night made way for shock and incomprehension as old wounds reopened.

The O’Driscoll murder-suicide came two years and a day since the manslaughter of Anthony Ward, an eight-year-old boy who was smothered by his mother Diane just two kilometres from where the twins were killed on Thursday night.

One man on his lunch break said that he knew the Ward family.

“People die, but you don’t expect kids to die in such a way. You wouldn’t expect to ever see it again in your life, not in an area like this,” he said.

For the town of Charleville, the devastation that cast the community in shadow on a bright autumn day was all too familiar.