A community in grief A community in grief William Hayes reflects on the impact of Ashling Murphy’s murder on the community of Tullamore.
William Hayes reflects on the impact of Ashling Murphy’s murder on the community of Tullamore.
T
he murder of Ashling Murphy was a crime that struck a note of horror around the world. As vigils took place as far apart as Sydney and New York, her death came to signify so much about the dangers that disproportionately face women in our society. In Tullamore these society-wide issues have been present, but for our community it has also been a time of shock and grief. Ashling was not only a national school (primary school) teacher who taught first class (P3) in a rural school just outside of the town, but she was involved in so many of the things that our community holds dear. She took part in GAA and played traditional Irish music. One of the local head teachers put it like this: “With all that she was part of, it feels that this is more than the killing of one person, but an attack at the heart of our whole community.” As a community, we gathered together for three vigils in different areas of the
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Herald March 2022
town on the Friday after her murder. I, along with the other clergy in town, led prayers at the vigil in Tullamore Town Park. As we waited for the vigil to start, we watched in awe as thousands upon thousands of people from in and around our town poured into the park. The stage was surrounded by hundreds of traditional musicians and the park was filled with the sound of their playing in the time running up to the vigil ceremony. As candles were laid out in the park in a heart shape, flowers began to be left at the entrance to the canal, and people expressed their shock and horror at all that had happened. The sharp mix of public grief, international media attention, and the private pain of a family brought to mind the events surrounding
The world’s cameras have gone but the grieving continues…
the death of Princess Diana. Just as at that time of international public mourning over the untimely death of a young woman, so in the mourning over the death of Ashling Murphy, there was a complex and intermingled web of grieving in which our own losses and fears were expressed. At the time of Diana’s death, a new term entered into the popular consciousness: ‘vicarious grief ’. It came to refer to that bundling up of our own grief with the public mourning of someone we did not know personally. Two decades ago that term was used to criticise the style and extent of the public grief over Diana, but vicarious grief is not something shallow, fashionable or tawdry to be distrusted or looked down upon. Wrapped up in our community and our country’s mourning for the murder of Ashling were the many losses that people up and down the country had faced during the pandemic. Alongside the grief for Ashling was the fear that
