VIDEO: Baltimore Drownings - Community in shock at popular family’s tragedy

The shockwaves from Tuesday’s tragedy have reverberated around the Baltimore area, where Barry Ryan’s wife, Ann Davis, is from and where the family have lived for the past two decades.

It was also felt at the headquarters of Penneys in Dublin where Mr Ryan — a son of Penneys founder Arthur Ryan — had worked as an executive, travelling from the family home at Lackahane, two miles outside Baltimore and spending much of the week in the capital.

His son, Barry Davis Ryan, had just completed the first year of his BA in Engineering at Cork Institute of Technology, but was working in Penneys in Cork, as was his girlfriend, Niamh O’Connor.

According to locals, Mr Ryan met his wife after she had finished her schooling and moved to Dublin. Her family are from a farming background, unlike her husband’s clan, particularly his father, Arthur, who founded Penneys in 1969 with its first store on Dublin’s Mary St and who only stepped down as chief executive of parent company Primark in the autumn of 2009.

Local Fianna Fáil councillor Joe Carroll said he had got to know Mr Ryan well over the years through Ms Davis’s family, who are well-respected in the area.

Mr Carroll said Mr Ryan seldom mentioned work or what was effectively the family business, and preferred to speak about his role as a cameraman for the Turf Club, filming head-on shots of horses as they crossed the finishing post at race courses such as Leopardstown.

While he was often seen attend race meetings and travelling up to Dublin for work, his children — including Barry Davis Ryan— were all schooled locally in the Rath National School, just a few miles outside Baltimore and near the family home.

Ms Davis had grown up in the area and, in recent years, was dedicated to looking after her mother, Hannah, who passed away last year.

Barry Davis Ryan, meanwhile, was working in Penneys alongside his studies in CIT. Yesterday, Barry O’Connor, vice-president for academic affairs and registrar at CIT, extended his “sincere condolences to the families of the victims of this tragic accident”.

“Barry Davis Ryan was a first year engineering student in CIT and his loss will be deeply felt by his classmates and the wider engineering faculty in CIT,” said Dr O’Connor.

“CIT would like to express its sympathies to the Davis Ryan family on the loss of a father and son and to the family of Niamh O’Connor. The Institute also commiserates with the wider Baltimore and West Cork community with whom the Institute has a long-established association.”