The body of Kevin Fitzpatrick was found in a Limerick skip last month. How did a bright student, whose family home was open to him, die in such lonely circumstances? Ruadhán Mac Cormaic, Migration Correspondent, went to his home town of Derby to find out
May Fitzpatrick knew. So strong was the feeling that, on opening the door that Wednesday morning to find two police officers standing awkwardly before her, it was she who spoke first. "Is it Kevin?"
Seven years after the third of her six children last crossed the threshold of the family home in Derby and set off in search of a new start in Ireland, the policemen brought news of a man they believed was 36-year-old Kevin Fitzpatrick. He had been found dead in a warehouse in Limerick, they explained. Only later did they call back to tell her there was more bad news.
"It's just so awful for her. She's been in a daze for weeks," says Kevin's sister, Maria, of her mother. "She can't bear the thought. In life you have loss, don't you? You lose your parents as you get older. But not your child - and in such tragic circumstances."
Over the next few days the Fitzpatricks would learn that Kevin had been crushed to death when the commercial rubbish bin in which he was sleeping was emptied into a collection lorry. His body was discovered by workers at the Mr Binman waste recycling centre in Grange, Co Limerick, when they were sorting rubbish that Monday morning.
The family would be told that local gardaí thought he had come to Limerick from Cork the day before, for reasons unknown. Instead of making contact with groups helping the destitute in Limerick, he had taken shelter in the bin when temperatures dropped on Sunday night. He was asleep when it was loaded on to the lorry.
Last Wednesday, three weeks to the day since they heard of his lonely death, Kevin Fitzpatrick was buried at Derby's Nottingham Road Cemetery, in a quiet, elevated part of the graveyard that gives an expansive panorama of the city below. He rests beside his late father, Joe - a Dubliner who died almost two years ago - at the end of a small path yellowed with freshly fallen leaves.
Earlier that day a large funeral Mass took place across town at St Joseph's Church, in the parish where Kevin had served as an altar boy, not far from the house where he and his siblings were raised in the Irish satellite district of Normanton. In a congregation of people mostly with Irish accents, the pews were tight with friends and neighbours who hadn't seen him in almost a decade.
This was Kevin Fitzpatrick's milieu. At school in St Joseph's his would have been a classroom filled with the children of Irish emigrants who settled in the area in the 1950s and 1960s, and at home, too, the Fitzpatrick children were ensconced in their Irishness. Like many of Derby's émigrés, holidays were spent "at home" in Ireland and ears were tuned devotedly to Irish sport and politics.
"These are my Irish children," Joe would say when introducing his kids to strangers.
The third Fitzpatrick child - he came after Martin and Maria and was an older brother to Joseph, Jeanette and Philip - is recalled by his teachers as a clever and thoughtful pupil who came from a good family. "He was a very bright lad," says Sr Raphael Lynch, a family friend who taught Kevin at primary school. "Academically, he had no problem. Right from the age of seven he played chess in school, and he was the number one player we had."
With the hope of eventual return, Kevin's father Joe had left Dublin in the mid-1960s to join his brothers in Derby and find work on the building sites of Britain's east midlands. He met his future wife, May - who was in Derby for a visit, but ended up staying for life - in 1967, at a time when buses could be filled with the Irish who were arriving every month. Manageably sized and close to regional centres such as Nottingham and Leicester, this was an industrial town on the rise. The large power stations were then being built along the River Trent and the two totemic employers - British Rail and Rolls Royce - offered a regular wage to tens of thousands of men and women.
FR TIM O'SULLIVAN, a Kerryman and parish priest at St Mary's across town, believes that whereas that first generation found comfort in each other's company, and by following events at home as though they had never left, their children - though ostensibly better equipped to integrate - did not have the same cohesive comforts available to them. Many found themselves straddling an uneasy divide: Irish in England, English in Ireland.
"This next generation - Kevin's generation - I often have sympathy for them because they were caught. They were English, they were Derby - they supported Derby County - but at home it was always about being Irish," he says wearily.
"Then you had the stuff in the North, where they were pulled in several directions. First of all they abhorred the violence and the bombing. Then they had to cope with the fact that they were being blamed for it, and some of them abused because of it.
"They had a problem with identity. And I have often wondered, since it happened, why did Kevin go to Ireland? Why did he want to stay there? He would have found it difficult enough in Dublin with a Derby accent, and maybe more so in Cork."
WHEN HE FINISHED school in the mid-1980s, Kevin spent a few years drifting in and out of factory jobs in the town. He lived in a couple of council flats but, like his brothers and sisters, never strayed far from the family home in Normanton. In recent weeks the family have scoured their memories for explanations, for turning points, for the telling anecdote that might shine light on the seven-year-old question.
"He stayed at school, and then he had jobs here," says Maria. "But I think by that time he had got in with a wrong crowd and he'd started to drink . . . and he was easily led."
A major - and difficult - part of his life in these years was the collapse of a long-term relationship with a local girl. The couple had three children, but after a few years together they parted and the children - all close in age - were given up for adoption. By then Kevin had lost contact with many of his old school friends.
At the time, nobody was too concerned when Kevin told his family he was going to Ireland. He'd be back before long, they presumed. But in retrospect the family think he wanted to start afresh and felt removing himself from Derby was the only sure way of going about it.
Dublin was his first stop, and to his family's knowledge he never found a job there or anywhere else in Ireland. He fell into a routine of sleeping rough, first in Dublin, then in Cork - and was known to charitable groups in both cities. Some who crossed his path in city hostels recall a quiet man who kept largely to himself. But throughout his time in Ireland he kept in touch with his family, calling home on family birthdays and often writing good-humoured letters. His mother last heard from him on her birthday last July, when he said for the first time that he'd be home for Christmas.
SITTING IN HER living room in Derby's Alvaston area, amid a thicket of Mass cards and letters, Maria recalls her conversations with Kevin being studded with laughs and jokes. She remarks that, whatever his private turmoil, he never complained about his lot. During a call last year he told her he had fallen for a local girl. "He said she was the love of his life. I said, 'where are you stopping tonight?' And he said, 'we've got our sleeping bags - we're stopping underneath the bridge.' He wasn't with her the next week," she remembers.
Over the years Joe and May came to visit their son many times, bringing him warm clothes and pleading with him to return. Their last meeting was around Christmas almost two years ago, when they got word that he was in St James's Hospital with a broken hip. His father was to die a month after the visit, aged 61. "They told him his home was there waiting for him, but what can you do with a 30-year-old lad if he doesn't want to come back?" says Sr Raphael Lynch.
May Fitzpatrick's children - teachers, businessmen, accountants and nurses - have done well for themselves, and Maria wonders whether the favourite child - for that he was, she says - was intimidated by his siblings' achievements. Did he perhaps feel he had let his parents down, and did this keep him from returning? "There was no reason why he had to feel like that, because he was clever - he could have been anything he wanted to be."
When Joe Fitzpatrick died, the family had trouble finding Kevin and didn't track him down until the day before the funeral - but without a passport or any photo ID, he couldn't travel. "He was sobbing on the phone - it was really bad," says Maria. "And mum was saying, 'Kevin, just come home and it will be all right.' But I think he didn't want to face it. Afterwards he said he had gone into church and lit candles, so he was mourning as well, but it must have been difficult."
She laughs at the recollection of his knowing joke to his mother at the time: "Don't be ringing me with any more bad news, mum."
LOSING HER HUSBAND and her son in such a short time has taken a toll on May Fitzpatrick, a warm-hearted woman whose strong Lurgan accent mocks a 40-year remove. "If he had died in bed or something like that, I think she could have accepted it," says Maria. "Deep down, as the years went on, I think she knew one day something would happen to him. Living like that, in that wild way, eventually it will catch up with you.
"But he was 36. He had a life in front of him. It's a waste, isn't it? A complete and utter waste. To go like that. She can't get her head around it."
As Fr Bill Naylor brought Wednesday's funeral mass to a close, the small church fell silent and, taking their cue from the first bars of Sinatra's My Way, the pall-bearers prepared to hoist the coffin. Then May Fitzpatrick rose suddenly and moved quickly towards the coffin before wrapping her arms tightly around it and dropping her head to its hard surface. "Kevin," she sobbed. "Kevin."
In his eulogy, Martin Fitzpatrick - May's eldest - spoke of the special bond between his mother and her third child. Kevin's was never a conformist mind, he said. He lived a short, unconventional life, but the family's memories of him are alight with warmth, with colour. "Kevin was my mum's hat-trick, and like a footballer who gets to keep the match ball when he scores a hat-trick, Kevin remained mum's match ball - one that she will keep for her life."
It could have been yesterday, Martin said, that he was standing on the same altar at St Joseph's, bidding farewell to his father. On that day he quoted from The Broken Chain, a poem of unknown authorship whose last verse likens death to a breaking of the family chain. But with God's will, the poet has it, that chain may one day be restored. "This afternoon, when Kevin is laid to rest, that will be the first link, and some day the whole chain will be put back together again."