SONGWRITER AND composer Phil Coulter has paid tribute to murdered Bray man Sebastian Creane whom he described as being almost a part of his family.
Coulter said “Seb” was one of the oldest and closest friends of his eldest son Daragh whom the Coulter family have known for 10 years.
Another son Ryan, who is a goalkeeper with Dundalk FC, left a wreath outside the Creane family home in Cuala Grove, Bray, on Monday.
Coulter said Mr Creane and Daragh were among a group of about five or six friends in Bray who hung out together surfing, playing cards and going to rugby matches.
Mr Creane had done some work for his website and was talented and intelligent, he added.
He described him as “one of the most respectful, one of the quietest and one of the most charming lads I have ever encountered.
“He is a kind of lad that any father would be proud to have as a son. He’s the kind of lad that any father would be happy to have his daughter bring home.
“He was immensely bright, immensely talented and had a great future stretching out before him. What a terrible waste of a life.”
Mr Creane was stabbed to death in his family home by Shane Clancy (22), an acquaintance of his whom he had met while on a night out in Dublin and Bray.
Mr Creane’s girlfriend Jennifer Hannigan and his brother Dylan were badly injured by Mr Clancy, whose body was later found in the back garden of the house.
Coulter said the suggestion that the row might have been “drink-fuelled” was something that was not in character for Mr Creane. “Nothing could be further from the truth. Seb was not a party animal. He was anything other than an all-night boozer,” he said.
Coulter and his wife, the former singer Geraldine Brannigan, have six children and have been long-time residents of Bray.
The songwriter has experienced tragedy himself. His social worker sister Sandra was murdered when a client drove a car she was a passenger in over a pier and into the sea during the 1980s.
He said yesterday we had become immune as a society to the violence around us. “I know from personal experience the death of a loved one is always painful, death through unnatural causes is doubly painful,” he told RTÉ Radio 1’s Liveline programme.
“To lose someone you love in such a violent and brutal manner is very hard to accept and comprehend.”
A friend of Mr Clancy called Phillip also contacted the programme to describe him as a “great man”.
He said the tragedy had made him and his other friends look at themselves and the way they live their lives.
“It is a shock to everybody, to all my peers. It is like, where do you see yourself tomorrow?
“One day everything is fine, then the next it is just blown up into pieces.
“You take your life in your hands every day. You have to live your life one day at a time and do your best for the day that is in it.”
The friend, who went to school with Mr Clancy, refuted suggestions that he might have been into drugs or came from a bad background.
“These people came from good backgrounds. My heart goes out to the Clancy family and the Creane family.”
