SOME 1,200 people attended the funeral yesterday of Daniel Cleary (4) who was crushed beneath a thick steel door on Thursday last.
Daniel’s parents, Keith and Patricia, led the mourners at the funeral Mass in St Patrick’s Church, Donegal town, where his maternal grandparents, Patrick and Mary Gildea, are sacristans.
Relatives and friends carried the coffin for several hundred yards before it was transferred to the hearse for the burial two kilometres away in Clar cemetery.
A moving solo, Danny Boy, was sung as the remains were carried out of the church.
Earlier parish priest Fr Willie Peoples, in a moving tribute to Daniel – who had one brother David (2) – recalled how a burden was visited upon his parents “at a time when the sun shone and life seemed normal and good”.
Fr Peoples said: “The beautiful life and personality of little Daniel would have been charted over the last few days. Little Daniel was very kind and caring and a lovely little child. He always had a smile and a lovely glint in his eye.
“The child loved playing in his wellies and jeans, and every day his favourite saying was ‘what will we do now?’”
Daniel, who would have been five in August and due to start school this year, died on Thursday evening when a thick steel door separated from a shipping container and crushed him in a yard close to his home at Drumbar, near Donegal town, where his father ran a haulage business.
His father was in Scotland on business at the time of the tragedy.
Gardaí said the only investigation was an inquiry for a coroner’s inquest.
Daniel died at the scene and a postmortem was carried out on Friday at Letterkenny General Hospital.