Irish society is failing its young because people are too busy "making hay" in the Celtic Tiger economy to spend time with their children, mourners were told yesterday at the funeral of two of the young men who were killed in a head-on collision in Threemilehouse on Saturday morning.
Fr Martin O'Reilly, youth director with the Diocese of Clogher, told the packed congregation in St Mary's Church, Threemilehouse, that "we have been making hay for the last 20 years when our young people have been growing up. We have thrown iPods at them, mobile phones, colour televisions, DVDs, whatever you call them, and VCRs but we fail to throw ourselves at them. Forgive us for how we have neglected you," he said.
Fr O'Reilly was officiating at the funeral of 20-year-old cousins Gary McCormick and Ciarán Hagan from Threemilehouse. One hour earlier, their friend Brian O'Neill (19) was buried in the cemetery overlooking the small Monaghan village. This morning, another friend, Dermot Thornton (21), will be buried after funeral Mass in St Mary's Church. A fifth man, John McQuillan, died last night at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda from injuries he sustained in the crash.
Threemilehouse came to a standstill yesterday. St Mary's Primary School, which had been attended by all four men, closed yesterday and remains closed today. The car park of the sole pub was packed with mourners' cars, and after the funeral local people offered tea to more than 1,000 mourners at the local sports complex.
Fr O'Reilly told mourners there had been "road accident after road accident" in recent months. Some people called for increased policing but this was not the only issue, he said. Protecting the dignity of human life was the solution and this was about collective responsibility.
People should be able to say to others, "you can't drive, you've had too many drinks", or "slow down, you are going too fast". He said we had lost the ability to do this because the young people in our community no longer knew us. He stressed he was not talking about the families of the crash victims, as their parents had done everything they could for their children and had loved and cared for them. Fr O'Reilly said we had a collective responsibility as adults to look after young people in our community.
"We have lost something very, very wholesome in Irish society," he said. Years ago, communities were full of parents who would act as parents to neighbours' children, reprimanding them where the need arose if their own parents were absent. In the 12 years since his ordination, he said he had buried "more of the generation that has come after me than the generation that came before me". If we could not feel the pain of families bereaved by a road crash in Kerry or Donegal, Belfast, Galway or Dublin, he said, "then we have lost the meaning of what death is really about".