The Opinion Pages | EDITORIAL NOTEBOOK

Sorrowing Ireland Buries Its Own

By LAWRENCE DOWNESJUNE 23, 2015

The funeral of Eoghan Culligan, one of the students killed in Berkeley, Calif.CreditNiall Carson/Press Association, via Associated Press

The bonds that knit a small country, its resemblance to a large and far-flung family, its citizens’ deep capacity for empathy — all of that was on full and stunning display last week in Ireland. It was a time of shock and grieving over the accident at an apartment building in Berkeley, Calif., that left six young Irish citizens dead and seven injured. Most were college students, working in the United States through the J-1 summer visa program. They were at a birthday party when a balcony gave way.

Last Tuesday morning, I awoke to the grim news on the remote Aran island of Inishmaan. The innkeeper told me she was keeping vigil with a woman there whose son was in Berkeley on a J-1 visa. The anxious mother was avoiding the phone and television, taking what reassurance she could as the hours passed without news of the worst.

On Wednesday, as I drove through County Clare, the radio news and call-in programs pored over the emerging story, callers voicing grief and sympathy. On Thursday, I bought a pile of newspapers at a Tesco supermarket in Kilrush, every front page devoted to Berkeley. It’s so very sad, said the woman at the checkout counter: those poor parents. By late in the week, in Dublin, the papers were still full of tributes to the dead, details of the mourning, essays about the joys and anguish of parenthood.

One headline simply quoted James Joyce: “They lived and laughed and loved and left.” At a Sunday morning Mass at the cathedral in Ennis, parishioners asked repose for the young people’s souls and solace for their loved ones, sentiments surely repeated in every pulpit and pew the country over.

“Our hearts are breaking,” said Philip Grant, Ireland’s consul general in San Francisco. Ireland’s minister for the diaspora, Jimmy Deenihan, calledthe dead “the children of Ireland.”

Five were from the Dublin suburbs: Eimear Walsh, Olivia Burke, Eoghan Culligan, Niccolai Schuster and Lorcan Miller. The sixth, Ashley Donohoe, Ms. Burke’s cousin, was from the Bay Area and held American and Irish citizenship.

They were Ireland’s young ambassadors, working summers in the J-1 program, which has sent more than 150,000 Irish students to America in 50 years, including 8,000 last year. The program has long been a rite of passage for international students, and recently an embarrassment to the United States, as it has grown into this country’s largest guest-worker program, poorly regulated and ripe for abuse of the students. In 2012, J-1 students, weary of intolerable conditions at a Pennsylvania chocolate factory, walked off the job in protest.

At the funeral for Mr. Culligan outside Dublin on Tuesday morning, hundreds slowly filled the pews at the Church of the Annunciation, many taking time to greet the family, including representatives of Ireland’s president and prime minister. A priest welcomed the mourners, including those watching online from California in the middle of the night. He turned to T.S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi.”

“A cold coming we had of it,” he said.

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a long journey:

The ways deep and the weather sharp.

It is a bleak journey for six stricken families, certainly, but one perhaps eased by their knowing that an entire country was making it with them.