'Despair is this morning draped like dark bunting over Barefield'

Irish Daily Mirror

16 hours ago

Despair is this morning draped like ominous, dark bunting over the Clare village of Barefield.
The reverberations of the gun shots which ended the lives of Vanessa Whyte and her teenage children, James and Sara Rutledge, 150 miles away in Fermanagh echo in a haunting, incomprehensible volley across the 45-year-old's home place.
Even under the July sunshine, Barefield is a place without light, the mood, to borrow from a 1950s Deep South preacher describing the climate of horror during that decade of serial Mississippi lynchings, blacker than a thousand midnights.
A family wiped out, endless hopes and dreams expunged, heartbeats stilled in the heartbeat it takes to squeeze a cold trigger.
The flag of decency flies at half-mast. Parents, lost for words, hug tightly to their offspring.
Vanessa had studied veterinary medicine, a woman with a vocational urge to bring compassion into the world of struggling creatures, to ease their distress. Vanessa Whyte, pictured here wearing a Clare GAA jersey, alongside her children Sara Rutledge and James Rutledge (Image: The Police Service of Northern Ireland)
For many years she was a camogie player, most vibrantly alive when she stepped onto a rectangle of grass, hurl in hand, and felt that exhilarating dopamine rush of sporting combat course through the entirety of her being.
Her sense of place is self-evident in a beautiful photograph of James, Sara and herself attending a Clare hurling match, most likely one of the games on their run to 2024 All-Ireland glory, a milestone clinched a year to the week before the brutal tragedy.
Vanessa stands between her two children, a protective, affectionate arm draped around each of their shoulders.
The three of them, pillars supporting the others' lives. A portico of love.
All are uniformed in The Banner's saffron and gold colours. Sara wears a Clare training top, her flowing mane held back by one of the headbands which are a fashion item on big match days. James, smiling blissfully, is blanketed by a county flag.
Vanessa's county jersey, a badge of identity, is proudly on display beneath an unzipped sleeveless jacket. Though her eyes are hidden beneath sunglasses, her pride and maternal affection are strikingly evident in every pixel.
Two decades living outside Clare, but the fire of place still burning at her core. Forever a daughter of the Banner. And though her children were affiliated with GAA clubs in Fermanagh, that they inherited their mother's passion for that beautiful Atlantic county of her birth is self-evident. Vanessa Whyte and her children, Sara (13) and James (14), on the big screen at Croke Park ahead of All-Ireland football final
The picture is a sunburst of joy, a chorus of togetherness. It is the music of a family song.
An idyllic scene that summons the words of the writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "the time when they loved each other best, without hurry or excess."
A snapshot that teems with life, yet, this morning, unimaginably, none of the photograph's trio of carefree figures breathe.
A hailstorm of death rained down on Maguiresbridge, hard by Enniskillen, on Thursday.
The narrow street of our understanding struggles to simultaneously accommodate these two truths - the vitality bursting from the match day freezeframe and the monstrous ending which leaves its three subjects with suddenly stilled hearts.
At such moments, the world becomes a sentence without grammar, baffling, opaque, beyond comprehension.
Earlier this week, I spoke to my friend Mick Galwey, the beloved former Munster and Ireland rugby player. A Kerryman imbued with the dust of the land that formed him (and a teenage All-Ireland winner under Mick O'Dwyer in 1986), our conversation centred around tomorrow's Croke Park showpiece, the mesmeric David Clifford front and centre of our chat. Hearses carrying the three coffins. (Image: Justin Kernoghan)
Mick, a man of emotional depth, speaks with powerful empathy about the sudden death of his friend and teammate Anthony Foley. "Axel" was just 42 and coaching Munster when, without warning, his heart ran out of juice in the autumn of 2016.
Galwey had been best man at Foley's wedding. Seven years between them, but they were tight. Like an elder and younger brother. Just a week before his death, Foley had driven straight from a match to Mick's 50th birthday party.
"Not a bother on him. In mighty form. A week later he was dead. It took me to a very dark place. You are wondering 'what is this about?'
"It was devastating and terrifying to realise you can be laughing and joking and seemingly in full health one day and then, bang, it is all over. Christ."
Though the circumstances are very different, the surge of emotion that floored a warrior giant as he accompanied his friend's body home, the cortege driving past their old Thomond Park stomping ground to find the streets lined by thousands, the footpaths wet with tears, will, I suspect, resonate with those closest to Vanessa. The three are to be buried in Ennis, Co. Clare, on Saturday. (Image: Jonathan Porter/PressEye)
A huddle of broken family and friends, poor souls who must be adrift in the heaviest fog of grief and bewilderment.
Galwey's memories, though stark, poetically express the human impulse to draw strength from the deepest bonds: "You are broken hearted, I mean broken hearted, but you want to grab the guy next to you and say, I don't know, say, 'I love you.'"
Sport - notably, hurling - is an essential thread in the fabric of Barefield, a means for a small place to maintain its identity, even as the tentacles of the nearby big town, Ennis, sink deeper and deeper into its heartland.
Jamesie O'Connor, the 1997 Hurler of the Year, a totemic figure on Ger Loughnane's class of 1995, the one that ended Clare's 81 year wait for an All-Ireland, hurled for the local club, St Joseph's Doora-Barefield.
His brother Christy, the long-time St Joseph's goalkeeper and a decorated sports writer, penned an evocative, award-winning tome about a year in the life of the village centrepiece, a communion of people that was such a part of Veronica's life.
Titled "The Club", the book is set against the backdrop of two tragedies in the parish and reveals the central role - supportive, cathartic, practical, distracting, vital - the local GAA branch plays at times of stygian struggle.
Vanessa's father, Joe, played on St. Joseph's first ever county hurling winning team in 1954. Her brothers, Steve and Ivor, hurled alongside Jamesie and Christy.
It is a familiar tale.
Among the more affecting moments of big match days at Croke Park are when tributes are paid to a recently deceased stalwart, their picture flashing up on the big screen as the PA announcer, Gerry Grogan, gives a potted history of their life of service.
What gets me right in the gut is when, spontaneously, a burst of applause, gentle at first, then rising in volume yet always respectful, accompanies the brief eulogy.
Most people don't personally know the deceased, but they are aware of somebody just like them in their own community. A father, a daughter, a neighbour, who, though their volunteerism or their sporting deeds, improved the lives of others.
In that cameo, when applause disturbs the silence, goodness lives.
As it indisputably will in Clare and Fermanagh in the days ahead, a sustaining counterpoint to the unfolding horror and disorientation that makes it hard to breathe.
No mother will look at the pictures of Vanessa with James and Sara without seeing their own children and feeling the strongest protective surge of something visceral and primal wash over them. Something born in the womb.
Tragedies like these are a crossword puzzle in an alien tongue. How can anybody begin to look for answers when they cannot even comprehend the clues.
A year ago, on a joyous day, perhaps Vanessa and her children sang along as Tony Kelly inspired All-Ireland glory was accompanied by a deafening Croke Park chorus.
"Oh my lovely rose of Clare/you're the sweetest girl I know/the queen of all the roses/and the pretty flowers that grow/you are the sunshine of my life/so beautiful and fair/and I will always love you/my lovely rose of Clare.
Those words means infinitely more this morning.
Barbarously difficult weeks and months stretch before those who share a bloodline with Vanessa, James and Sara.
They will know the profound truth in Mick Galwey's description of broken hearts, in the elemental need to hold somebody close and tell them, with tears filling their eyes and unbearable hurt stabbing at their soul, they are loved.