HUGH FRIEL FUNERAL:HUGH FRIEL was "a lovely, quiet, pleasant gentleman . . . easy pleased", said Fr Fintan Diggin at the funeral Mass of the 66-year-old farmer from Dunaff, who was killed in the two-car crash that claimed eight lives on Donegal's Inishowen Peninsula last Sunday.
Heavy rain swept across the little post-Famine church of St Michael in Urris, in the Racthan Hills, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, as Mr Friel’s coffin was escorted in by the chief mourners, his three brothers and two sisters, Eddie, Paddy, Denis, Sally and Bridget, and many young members of the extended family, who contributed in a mixture of English and Irish accents to the readings and the prayers of the faithful.
Fr Diggin’s parish of Clonmany lost three young men in the crash. This is also the parish of Shaun Kelly, the driver of the car in which the eight young men were travelling and who is “fighting for his life in Letterkenny hospital”.
Mr Friel, who was returning from bingo in Buncrana and the sole occupant of the second car, was the first of the crash victims to be buried. It was a simple Mass, concelebrated with Fr Paul Farren and Fr Michael Canny, both natives of the area, with traditional hymns sung by local man Danny McCarron.
Fr Diggin recalled his own arrival in Clonmany and contrasted his early impressions of this traditional fishing community, when many of the houses displayed memorial cards and photos of family members who lost their lives at sea, with the situation now.
“Now all that seems to have changed to loss of life on the land. With the multiple fatalities we’d already seen on our roads, every family affected then would have prayed and hoped that theirs would be the last. Sadly, it wasn’t. And we are left with despair, tragedy and suffering.”
He said that “Hugh loved working on his bit of farmland and was a great neighbour . . . He grew up in a time and age when the common thing was to help one another. In rural Ireland, before farming became automated, people relied on the help offered by the neighbours.
“Hughie was steeped in that tradition. Everybody pulled together. To talk to Hughie, you know he’d say: ‘Doesn’t everybody behave that way?’ . . . That was the culture he grew up in and that was the character, the personality, the nature of the man.”
Fr Diggin noted that the offertory gifts included a cap owned by Hughie – “Hughie was folically-challenged, if that’s the right phrase” – and a bingo book and bingo pen. “His great distraction was playing the bingo. I think he won €65 on Sunday evening – and to him that would have been a fortune. I mention it because word got out that he’d won up to a thousand,” he said, evoking some smiles from the congregation. “Then coming home, he died so tragically on the road . . .”
Referring to the manner of Mr Friel’s death, Fr Diggin said he knew that “Hughie would never have wanted the circumstances in which he died to heap any more sadness on anyone else already in despair . . . I’m sure he would have used the phrase you hear so much these days – there but for the grace of God go I.
“All the families affected have their own heartbreak and sadness but they have been looking out for other families . . . And I know that members of Hughie’s family found it in their hearts to go out to other families, to offer their hand and pray for them.”
Danny McCarron sang Going Homeas the coffin was carried by family members to the adjoining cemetery.