Last November, while attending a meeting at the Tower Hotel which catalysed the formation of the Committee For The Forgotten, of which I’ve written extensively about since, I met a man from Bonmahon. Several years previously, it was he who had discovered the body of a friend, the most amiable of men, a person I’d known and enjoyed many a chat and laugh with for many years. What led him to the Copper Coast to do what he did that fateful day shall be known only to him.
Like so many others who knew and loved him, his death and the manner of it came as a huge shock. To meet the man who found him reminded me of the loss of my friend, not to me personally, but to his family and to those who knew him altogether better than I did. And it made me wonder: was there anything anyone could have done to have prevented his passing?
The spectre of death by suicide has become one which practically every community in Waterford and right across the country has sadly become all too familiar with over the past decade.
