The brutal killing of a 73-year-old pensioner who was found tied up in his house on the northside of Cork city last week was a mindless act which had reduced us all as a community and a society, a priest told mourners at the man's funeral Mass yesterday.
Fr Kieran Shorten said the killing of Gussie Hornibrook at his home at Templeacre Avenue, Gurranabraher, in Cork last week had not only shocked the entire community but also had reduced its sense of worth.
Mr Hornibrook, a bachelor who lived alone, was found at about lunchtime on November 6th with both his hands and his legs tied in a downstairs room of the terraced house where he had lived for more than 30 years and whose door he had never locked.
Fr Shorten recalled how when he was growing up in west Cork, there was an old tradition of leaving doors unlocked at Christmas time as a sign of people's willingness to welcome Christ into their home after Joseph and Mary found there was no room at the inn at Bethlehem.
"It wasn't Christ who came calling on Gussie last week but someone so deprived of respect for life, so deprived of respect for themselves that they had no respect for an old man almost 74," Fr Shorten told mourners at the Church of the Ascension in Gurranabraher.
Fr Shorten said Mr Hornibrook would be missed by his brothers Bobby and Billy, his nieces and nephews and other family members as well as by his neighbours.
"Gussie's needs were simple, a little bit of food which he shared with the birds, a little stroll up and down that street such that people could set their clocks by him, an occasional stroll down to the shrine on the Lee Road."