Close to 100 people gathered on Tuesday to mourn Qayyum Balogun, the 21-year-old who was fatally stabbed in Dublin city centre earlier this month.
He was laid to rest in Newtown Cross Lawn Cemetery, just north of the town of Drogheda.
“I don’t have much to say but I know he’s resting in the hands of the lord,” Teslimot Balogun, Qayyum’s mother, said after the service. “I’m really in pain. He’s irreplaceable. He’s my first son and I will miss him forever and ever. I can’t bear the pain but I know God is giving me my strength.”
Both Teslimot and Qayyum’s stepmother, Loveth Patrick, appealed for justice for Qayyum. They described him as an “innocent boy” and said he did not deserve what happened to him. Beside them, another mourner said Qayyum was lucky that he had been blessed with “two mums”.
READ MORE
“He’s a loved child,” Teslimot said. “He does his own thing, he doesn’t cause trouble and he loves everybody.”
Imam Nooh, of the Dundalk Muslim community, guided an Islamic burial for Qayyum, performing funeral prayers and dividing the congregation into rows of men and women. He explained that in Islam, women surround an infant as they enter the world, while men encompass the graveside as they leave. As Imam Nooh finished the prayers, men tossed handfuls of soil over Qayyum’s body to fill the grave.
Qayyum was born in Dublin in 2004, not long after his parents had moved to Ireland from Nigeria. They settled in Dundalk when he was a boy, and Qayyum was living there in the Ecco Road area with his father Ibrahim Balogun, his stepmother and three of his siblings at the time of his death.
He had been visiting Dublin on Sunday, May 31st, for a gig in Bewley’s cafe on Grafton Street alongside his 20-year-old sister Aliyah, with whom he was very close. They were seeing the Nigerian artist Famous Pluto, and it was after the gig, in the early hours of Monday, June 1st, that Qayyum was stabbed on Clarendon Street. The victim was well known on the African music scene in Dublin as a concert promoter.
He was in his third and final year of a computer science degree at Maynooth University, and would have turned 22 in September. He did his Leaving Certificate in Ó Fiaich College in Dundalk, before studying business and computing at the Ó Fiaich Institute of Further Education. He worked weekends in Burger King at the Castlebellingham service station near Drogheda. It was rare that he would socialise at night-time, with the trip to Dublin a one-off event.
Before his burial, family and loved ones spent time with Qayyum’s body in a small redbrick vestibule to the side of the graveyard.
Imam Nooh described it as the start of a very important journey. For many of those in attendance, it was an overwhelming, emotional goodbye.
