First you see the water; calm, shining Lough Foyle, wrapping itself around the curve of land that is Quigley’s Point in Co Donegal. Then you notice the memorial and its three pillars — one each for John, Tomás and Amelia Mullan.
Suddenly, just beyond, you see it, stretching along the coastline: a field of bright yellow sunflowers.
“Plant a seed and see what grows, that’s what John would have said to me,” says his wife, Geraldine. “The sunflower is a beacon of hope and I hope that everyone who comes here to the Field of Hope at the weekend will go away with their own little bit of hope.”
Geraldine lost her entire family — her husband, John, and their children, 14-year-old Tomás and six-year-old Amelia — two years ago.
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They were coming home from a family day out to the bowling alley and cinema when their car left the road during a storm and plunged into the lough. Geraldine was the only survivor.
This weekend she will mark the second anniversary of their deaths by inviting people to walk through a maze of sunflowers she has grown in their memory; the path spells out the word “hope”.
“The scene [of the tragedy] is just there and John, Tomás and Amelia would have been found in the water, so it is hard for me,” she says.
“I look to the right [to the lough] and my heart is broken, but I look to my left [to the sunflowers] and my heart is still broken, but there’s a sea of yellow cascading above me and it is beautiful.”
Geraldine has devoted her life to honouring their memories. Her husband’s business, a garden centre in Moville, is now the Mullan Hope Centre, a hub for charity work and community events.
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Originally from Williamstown, Co Galway, the tragedy left her without family in the area. “The community have adopted me into their hearts so the Field of Hope, the farmers’ market, the charity bike ride ... it’s my way of saying thank you to the community and giving me a focus to keep going as well.
“Doing the things that I do in memory of John, Tomás and Amelia keeps their memory alive ... as long as I breathe, their memories will forever live on.”
As we enter the maze, Geraldine explains how sunflowers became one of the “family lockdown projects” in early 2020. Amelia wanted to enter a sunflower festival in nearby Redcastle and, one Sunday morning, “the four of us just planted sunflowers”.
However, “Amelia being Amelia”, extra seeds were planted and they ended up with 31 pots of flowers; seeds from one of those original sunflowers were used to grow the flowers in the centre of the maze.
Last year Geraldine’s friend, Catherine Carlin, “had this vision of a field of sunflowers” and her father, John McCarron, donated his field for the purpose. Geraldine got to know the family through McCarron’s son-in-law, Kevin Barr, the coastguard who saved her life on the night of the tragedy.
“My journey over the last six months with this field took me back to that journey in 2020, and yes there have been plenty of tears but then it also brings me smiles of Amelia getting the 31 pots and John looking after them and the four of us admiring them because it was like a sea of yellow on the side of our house,” says Geraldine. “Precious memories.”
The further we go into the maze, the taller the sunflowers become, until they are above our heads. Geraldine describes the additional features she has planned for a weekend — “a selfie booth, because my wee lady loved her photographs” — and the additional symbolism of sunflowers as the national flower of Ukraine.
We come to two sunflowers which lean on each other in the middle of the path, with a single sunflower in front of them. “I couldn’t pull them out — this one’s Tomás and this is Amelia and John is here in front of them.
“I could talk about them for hours,” she says of her loved ones, describing “beautiful family holidays” and the nearby beach where they had their first date.
John was “my best friend, my soul mate. I was so lucky to have been loved by him”. She describes her “big six-foot-two, strapping man” who would always come straight over to give her a hug and a kiss when she came in to see him at work in the garden centre; who “put everybody first and himself last” and who loved Christmas so much that one year they had nine Christmas trees.
“Tomás, he was the most patient, kind boy, he was 14 but wise for his years, full of fun, a beautiful smile ... and the best big brother to his little sister.
“He and John were like two peas in a pod and John had made the agreement with him that if Tomás didn’t drink until he was 18 he’d buy him a car. Tomás had already picked out the car.
“And as for ‘Miss Molly’, I wouldn’t have her any other way. Amelia, she was my little sunflower, my little ray of sunshine, and from the moment she arrived she had her daddy and her big brother wrapped around her little finger.
“She was beautiful, she had gorgeous curly hair and thought she was the next best TikTok dance queen,” she says.
We emerge from the maze to a view of the lough and, in the distance, the memorial. The anniversary, she says, will be difficult. “It’s a day at a time and Saturday, it’ll be minute by minute.
“It doesn’t take away from the sadness and the pain but this has been a lovely project to work on, just getting my hands dirty and thinking about John, what he would have been doing in the garden this time of year and the kids going back to school. This [the Field of Hope] would have been a lovely family day out.
“John would have said to the kids, ‘the sunflower is so majestic and tall and it will reach towards the sky’. People walking the maze at the weekend can remember their loved ones and maybe remember my John and Tomás and Amelia as well, and by keeping them in their thoughts that will give me the strength and courage to keep going as well.
“That’s sometimes the way I cope and the way I manage. I won’t have my family this weekend but if I see other families walking through here and kids laughing ... there’ll be tears because the three people I want aren’t here, but it’s because of those three people they will be here.
“It’s bittersweet, but please God they’ll be smiling down on all of us.
“I can hear John saying, ‘good on you, my Galway girl. You did this’, and Tomás and Amelia saying, ‘well done, Mummy’, and Amelia with her beautiful smile running through these fields.”
The Field of Hope at Quigley’s Point, Co Donegal will be open to the public from Friday 19th to Sunday 21st August at 12-5pm. For further information see the Mullan Hope Centre page on Facebook
