For the community of Creeslough, things will never be the same again.
Ten members of their community were taken from them when the main shop in the village – the deli, the post office and a hairdressers – was ripped apart.
Among those who died were a father and his five-year-old daughter, a mother and her teenage son, a young girl, and a man who was not from here, but had chosen Creeslough as his home.
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These people lost their lives doing something many of us do every day, in what Gardai are treating as an accident.
Despite the harrowing scenes many of them have witnessed, the community pulled together to look after one another and to feed and host the emergency services at the scene and the crowd gathered outside the cordon.
After darkness fell on Saturday night, a man stood in the doorway of a building with blown-out windows and offered people the use of his toilet.
The Coffee Pod cafe across from the scene filled shelves with sandwiches, soup, chocolate bars and tea and coffee, ceaselessly handing them out to anyone who needed them.
“It’s natural for us in these communities to do that,” Father John Joe Duffy told the PA news agency, echoing the words of Superintendent David Kelly, who said that looking after one another is what it means to live in Donegal.
Despite this show of kindness in the face of tragedy, Father Duffy expressed concern for his community that has a heavy burden of grief before them.
This includes the locals who rushed to the scene to pull people out from the debris at the confused scene, some using their bare hands to clear the rubble.
Others began using heavy machinery to lift away the rubble.
The trauma of what they experienced can be seen in their face or eyes, he said.
“You don’t imagine this would happen when you walk into a shop.
“I was in a shop in the neighbouring village and I was just in the middle of the shop when it dawned on me that this happened in our shop in Creeslough. It’s sort of unbelievable.
“There are momentary blips where I think ‘oh I must go to the shop’, and then I realise the shop’s not there, the post office is not there.”
He said that the community was like an extended family and they had lost several members of that family.
On Sunday, people were seen braving the bad weather to visit St Michael’s Church while a vigil in the nearby town of Milford saw hundreds attend to help process the scale of the loss.
Parents hugged their children and people carried candles at the gathering at the top of the town.
“I found it really difficult at mass this morning,” Father Duffy said.
“I knew some of the children involved in this tragedy and it just struck me, it was like a knife going into your heart, it was very hard to hold it together.
“The families that have lost a family member, that is the most tragic of all, but others have lost an extended family member – members of the community have lost an extended family member.”
One source of comfort has been the wide-ranging support from people across the island, the UK and further afield, including the cross-community support from the emergency services.
Taoiseach Micheal Martin said he had received a number of text messages from politicians in Northern Ireland and the UK expressing their sympathies.
SDLP leader Column Eastwood, who attended the service on Saturday night, told PA it was important to stand with their neighbours in the aftermath of “an unspeakable event”.
“It must be so difficult for families to get their head around how this could happen in an instant,” he said. “I do think it’s important that we’re here and that we stand with people.”
Father Duffy said that as a small rural community, “there’s certain strength within us”.
“I believe that we will get through this, and we will get through this by the prayer and goodwill, and by the strength, of what makes us unique.
“In a way, we’re like a large family. There’s a certain strength in that.”
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