When Billy Dennis and Dan Mullally were asked about the hardest days of their lives, both men paused before answering, before coming to the same conclusion.

"It's very hard to pick the hardest one," says Dan. Both of his parents are buried in the local cemetery just outside the village, and he counts himself fortunate that they both lived into their nineties. "As a family we had no complaints, they lived good lives," he reflects, acknowledging that not everyone has that luck. "Some people then lose their parents at young ages, and that can be hard."

But the loss that carries particular weight for Dan is more recent, and more unexpected; the death of a young man from Shinrone, a hurler, just a year before the conversation took place. "That was a hard time," he says. "The community got together in a massive way for that funeral, and everything else in the hall here afterwards. But that was a sad time in the village." It is the loss not of someone who had lived a full life, but of someone who should still have been in the middle of one.

Billy Dennis is more direct. "The hardest days of my life would have been burying my parents," he says. "My father died in sixty-eight, aged sixty-five. They were two very, very hard times."

His father had run the filling station in the village and, even in retirement, still came in each day out of habit. "He used to come down and read the paper and do the pumps," Billy says. One day he walked outside, placed his hands on the railings around the petrol pumps, and died on the spot. There was no warning, no illness, just the sudden end of a daily routine that had defined a life.

His mother's death came differently, and perhaps harder for being prolonged. "She was in bad health. She was diabetic and she got an ulcer on her leg and lost her leg over it. And she died shortly afterwards. They would have been the same to me."

What strikes both men is not only their own loss but their awareness of others who have carried greater grief. Dan is careful to note that his parents' long lives placed him in a fortunate position. "For some people, they don't have that luck," he says. Billy, for his part, does not dwell or elaborate; the facts of what happened to his parents are stated plainly.

Between the two men, there is an understanding of loss that comes not from any single event but from a lifetime spent in a small community where grief is shared.