IRELAND SOUTH MEP Brian Crowley yesterday paid tribute to his brother Flor for his great devotion to his family and friends, as hundreds gathered to pay respect to the father of three who was killed in a car crash on Sunday.
Brian Crowley told mourners at his brother’s funeral that it had been a source of great support to his brother’s family to have so many people come forward and tell them how Flor had touched their lives.
Flor Crowley (42) had been driving to 12 o’clock Mass in Bandon with his wife Aideen and children Ruth, Grace and Sarah, who range in age from 9 to 12, when his car skidded and hit a ditch and overturned at Meelon, on the Timoleague-Bandon Road.
An accountant, Flor Crowley was pronounced dead at the scene while his wife and daughters emerged uninjured, and yesterday they led the hundreds of mourners who thronged St Patrick’s Church in Bandon for the funeral Mass.
Brian Crowley said his late brother was devoted to his family. “The things that were important in his life were Aideen, Ruth, Grace and Sarah, his brothers, his sisters, his mother and his father,” he recalled.
Describing his late brother as “a big man who loved life”, Brian Crowley said anyone his brother encountered “came away the better for it”, before going on to recall the great value his brother placed on friendship.
Quoting from WB Yeats's The Municipal Gallery Revisited, with its lines "Think where man's glory most begins and ends/And say my glory was I had such friends," Brian Crowley said: "Flor's glory was great in the friends that he had and the support that they gave to him."
The second youngest in the family of six of late Cork South West Fianna Fáil TD Flor Crowley snr, the late Mr Crowley is survived by his wife and children, his mother Sally, brothers Brian and Niall, and sisters Maeve, Deirdre and Fiona.
Among the many mourners at yesterday’s concelebrated Mass led by Fr Denis O’Leary were Taoiseach Brian Cowen and former taoiseach Albert Reynolds, while President Mary McAleese was represented by her aide-de-camp,Capt Martin Larkin.
Other mourners included Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin, Minister for Education Batt O’Keeffe, and Fianna Fáil TDs Christy O’Sullivan, Michael Moynihan, Michael McGrath, Bobby Aylward, Brendan Kenneally and Noel Treacy.
Fellow MEPs Pat “The Cope” Gallagher, Marioan Harkin, Liam Aylward, Sean Kelly and Alan Kelly also attended, as did former MEPs Simon Coveney TD, Colm Burke, Pat Cox, John Cushnahan and Kathy Sinnott, and Senators Mark Daly and Michael McCarthy.
Others to pay their respects included former Fianna Fáil TD Danny Wallace, Cork Circuit Court Judge Con Murphy, Railway Procurement Agency CEO Frank Allen and Dr John O’Mahony of the board of the National Museum of Ireland.