Society must increase its efforts to understand the despair
young men sometimes feel, a priest told mourners at the funeral of three brothers who died in tragic circumstances last week.
At yesterday’s requiem Mass for nine-year-old twins Thomas and Patrick O’Driscoll, and their older brother Jonathan (21), Fr Tom Naughton said young men often find themselves plunged into a world of darkness and desperation.
“We are all questioning so many things and, no doubt, we’ll never find the complete answers at this side of the grave,” Fr Naughton told the 500 or so mourners who had gathered in the sun-filled Holy Cross Church in Charleville.
“But if these days have taught us anything at all, they challenge us to continue and to increase our efforts to understand and to assist, especially young males, to communicate the darkness that seems to be increasingly troubling young minds and hearts.
“It is possible that we have never had more activities and recreations, all sorts of noises and acquaintances around us, yet, at the same time, it seems that never have people been so lonely and lonesome.
“Why is this the case and what must we do to regain the simple joy of a serene and peaceful mind?” he asked as extended members of the O’Driscoll family consoled the boys’s grieving parents, Tom and Helen, and their siblings, Bernadette, Jimmy and Martin.
Outpouring of sympathy
Turning towards the boys’ parents, Fr Naughton spoke of how the tragedy had prompted an outpouring of sympathy not just in Charleville and north
Cork
but across the entire island of
Ireland
with many trying to share “the pain that they hold in their hearts”.
“We know that this is impossible to do, yet our desire is truly sincere because we really would, if we could, take at least some of your pain, Helen and Thomas, so that you don’t have to carry it all alone,” he said.
Following the Mass, the family shouldered the twins’ small white coffins through Charleville to Holy Cross Cemetery.
The family, accompanied by the mourners, returned to the church to take Jonathan on his final journey to nearby Kilmallock where he was buried with his maternal grandparents.
