Karen Buckley: ‘If the power of prayer could have done anything we would have had good news’

A friend and neighbour of Karen Buckley said she is haunted by the thought of Karen’s body being found on an isolated Scottish farm so far from her native Cork.

Denyse O’Brien said she was shocked when she first found out her neighbour, who had grown up on a neighbouring farm in Mourneabbey, North Cork, had first been declared missing.

She described how her shock soon turned to horror when she heard the news that Karen’s body had been discovered on a Glasgow farm.

READ MORE: Moving messages as social media pays tribute to Karen Buckley

“I find myself that, it’s something very sad, (how Karen) coming from a loving farm and ending up (dead) in a farm in another place. That to me I find very upsetting, for everybody obviously,” Ms O’Brien said.

The 30-year-old student, who went to primary school with Karen and Karen’s brothers Damien and Kieran, told the Limerick Today programme on Live 95FM, how the news of Karen’s disappearance had gripped the farming community of Mourneabbey for all the wrong reasons.

“We had a Mass [Wednesday night], and I left [the adjoining school] 18 years ago and all of the class the year I left where there and the church was full, people were standing, it was packed to capacity. There were people standing outside, there were still hundreds standing outside. It was very sad... all those times that we would have been in that church together as a school was for nativity plays and Communions and Confirmations.

“Karen’s older brother was at Mass because he hadn’t gone over [to Glasgow] and I never felt so claustrophobic. There was no where else I should have been, but it was just an awful claustrophobic kind of feeling,” she added.

“In Karen’s class there was just about five girls in it and all those other girls were there with their parents and those parents were [crying] because it could have been any one of those girls. It could have been any one of them.”

She described Karen as a person who was always at ease with herself, “one of those girls that is introvert and is happy to be introvert without having to be extrovert”.

She said over the past few days she feared the worst for her friend.

“I straight away went online to Kieran because I would talk to him a couple of times a week.

“We just started chatting back and forth, and the immediate sense of ‘Oh my God’ turned into this long-term sense of [dread] ‘Oh god what’s coming’.”

Meanwhile, the local community have rallied together, united in their grief for the loss of their beloved local nurse.

Praising the community’s efforts, Ms O’Brien said: “But to have been in Mourneabbey [at the Mass] and to have seen everybody come together, the elderly people, our former local bishop who’s in a nursing home now because he’s quite ill, he came back out to help say the Mass, and so many people gathered around. If the power of prayer could have done anything we would have had good news.”

She also praised Glasgow police for their investigation into Karen’s disappearance.

“The Scottish police work has been excellent and they have treated this like [Karen] was the most important person in the world, which is how the [Buckleys] would have wanted the case to have been treated.”

She added that her friend had done nothing wrong in leaving the nightclub alone in the moments before she went missing.

“Karen did nothing [wrong]. There’s not one of us that wasn’t out on a night that, for some reason or another thought, ‘Oh I’ll just take off’, whether you just felt like you’d had enough to drink or you wanted to go somewhere.

“She most definitely would have texted or sent a [Facebook] message, and I’m just glad that the police took it seriously enough and acted quickly enough, because we see a lot of the times where people have to wait 24-36 hours before they are a missing person.

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