Karen and the warm embrace of her home
ONE of the first signs that something sinister had happened to Karen Buckley was that in the hours after her disappearance, her social media accounts went dead. The 24-year-old was, like most of her generation, an enthusiastic social networker, regularly posting information about what she was up to for her community of online followers. There’s even a digital record of her last night alive, thanks to the photographs taken by one of her girlfriends before they headed out for the night last weekend.
The image of Karen and her friends all dolled up and posing in their flat injected a special poignancy into the mystery of her whereabouts.
As in the case of Jill Meagher, another young Irish woman who met a terrible fate while out socialising abroad, grainy CCTV images gave the police the first clue in their murder case.
The last we see of Karen alive is the footage of her talking to a bloke outside the nightclub before she dissolves into the darkened street.
Over subsequent days, a plethora of images of Karen were uploaded onto Facebook as part of the Please Help Find Karen information and fundraising campaign.
The photographs showed the nurse enjoying the benefits of her young and single life.
She may have been raised in a small rural community in north Cork but she was a global citizen. Only two years out of college, she had already travelled the world. She had seen the US and Thailand and her master’s in occupational therapy took her to Glasgow rather than Cork or Dublin.
When she died, two of her brothers, Kieran and Damien, were working in Sydney – a sign not just of how rural Ireland has been ravaged my emigration but also of how the world has shrunk and the likelihood of young people making homes in any corner of the world.
YET the outpouring of grief in the wake of Karen Buckley’s disappearance in her local community of Mourneabbey was the same as if she had never left . Hundreds of people of all ages, many of whom presumably have long given up on Mass attendance, turned up for a Mass of Hope in the small village, 12km outside Mallow.
As the crowds spilled out into the church car park, faces were etched in such shock and sorrow that it was as if they had just been talking to the missing woman that very day.
RTÉ News reported how for the first time in years, the local community centre lay in darkness that night. Tearful locals spoke of their fears for Karen and their regard for her parents, Marion and John, who are farmers and doted on their youngest child and only daughter.
Karen, like her brothers, played Gaelic football. She worked in the local hotel and the flags at her convent school in Mallow were at half mast in her honour.
But had she never played Gaelic or served in the hotel, the mourning would be the same. It was simply her birthright – what flowed to her simply because she belonged to a tightly knit community of only a thousand people.
The local priest explained how the community had sprung into action on the family’s behalf.
‘They are all affected,’ said Fr Joe O’Keeffe. ‘The neighbours and friends are rallying around and looking after the homestead while Karen’s parents are in Glasgow. They’re doing all they can.’
His use of the word ‘homestead’ may have been deliberate. It is evocative of another era, of settlers who looked out for one another as they cultivated the America prairies, of the self-sufficiency of large farming families.
It is not a word that relates to today where society seems so fractured and people don’t even know their neighbours.
But the death of Karen Buckley shows us how the bonds of neighbourliness run as deep as ever. The powerful display of community spirit in north Cork dwarfs any- thing that virtual communities can produce in terms of harnessing public spirit or mobilising people into campaigns.
Even the ice bucket challenge that ripped across the world in record time or the marvels of Skype in helping to keep people in touch are always trumped by the flesh-and-blood experience of real community life .
KAREN, her brothers and her vast circle of friends shared photographs and status updates, as we all do so that we can connect with a virtual community. But real communities like Mourneabbey’s operate in a fundamentally different way. The Buckleys and the neighbours and friends who have metaphorically wrapped their arms around them this week share with and support one another in good times and bad.
The community exists in order to support its members whereas in the virtual world, the community comes second and information comes first.
In the grief-stricken months ahead, long after the story vanishes from the headlines, the neighbours will look out for Marion and John Buckley and help them grieve for their daughter.
That closeness will be lost to their sons if they return to Australia, unless they are members of a GAA club or have an Irish pub where the community spirit is as much a draw as the next hurling fixture.
They might record the matches on YouTube, upload them to Instagram or chat about them on Skype.
But the online community they’ve created is only a pseudo comfort compared to the warmth of home.