"He had friends all over the world," one mourner said after yesterday's funeral in Clondra, Co Longford, of Mr Tom Croghan, the publican found stabbed to death in the village on Sunday night.
The recent stormy weather gave way to sunshine and calm on the morning of his funeral as family and friends gathered to bury the 71-year-old bachelor.
He was discovered in the hallway of his small pub, the smallest of three in the village, just before 9 p.m. on Sunday by a local man who had called to the premises after Mass. A kitchen knife was found near the body.
The horror of such an attack on an elderly man in a quiet village had hardly sunk in among the mourners at the local church yesterday, and a sombre mood hung over the congregation.
"Tom was a publican, not so much for profit but for society," Mr Denis Glennon, from Longford, a relative of the dead man, said.
Customers at Croghan's Pub could just as easily be a group of German visitors on a Shannon cruise, a carload from nearby Longford or locals, and the contact maintained, regardless of distance, bore testimony to the life of Tom Croghan.
There were large numbers at his removal from St Joseph's Hospital in Longford on Tuesday evening, and at the funeral yesterday.
People talked of how Mr Croghan had planned to retire next year. And a sense of disbelief hung over the congregation, that Clondra should become the location of Ireland's latest fatal stabbing, and that one of their own should be its victim.
At the funeral Mass, Mr Croghan's three sisters and their families were comforted by Father Dan Kelly and Father Tom Murray, who concelebrated the Mass.