Irish Grieve for Modern-Day Romeo and Juliet

In a land where bombings and shootings are almost a daily occurrence, the deaths of two young students have provoked an outpouring of grief.

The fate of the young Catholic couple, compared by a priest to Shakespeare’s lovers, Romeo and Juliet, has made people in this divided island reflect on a conflict that has taken 3,000 lives, maimed 30,000 others and shows no signs of ending.

Julie Statham, an only child, was found dead in her bed by her father less than a month after her fiance, Diarmuid Shields, was gunned down by Northern Irish Protestant extremists.

Father Dennis Faul, her priest, said she had died of a broken heart.

She had apparently taken an overdose just hours after attending a special Mass in her boyfriend’s memory.

Faul, reflecting on one of the most poignant deaths in a conflict that has generated so much sectarian hatred, said: “The ugly factions of Italy caused the deaths of Romeo and Juliet and now the ugly factions of Northern Ireland have taken the lives of these two young lovers.”

Fellow student Niall Dines said: “I have never met two people so much in love. They were totally mad about each other . . . almost like a modern Romeo and Juliet.”

Statham’s death was front page news in Dublin and Belfast with headlines like “Julie dies for love.”

In Northern Ireland’s first shooting of 1993, Protestant extremists burst into the Shields family home on Jan. 3. They killed 51-year-old Patrick and his 20-year-old son, Diarmuid.

The rest of the family was only saved by Brid Shields barricading her other son and daughter into a downstairs room.

In a tribute to the man she loved, Statham wrote in a local paper that his death “brought home to my doorstep just how fickle and trivial life can be.”

Writing anonymously, she said of Diarmuid: “His 21st birthday in early 1993 was to be the happiest time of his life because he could finally declare to the world that Julie and he were to be married.

“No one knew; it was something they kept to themselves. But they were both ecstatic at the prospect of finally being together. That prospect has been tragically snatched from their grasp.”

Diarmuid was to be 21 on March 6. “It was a day both longed for but which neither will now see,” wrote The Irish Press.

In a editorial, the Dublin paper said: “25 years filled with the hate and the horror of the Northern conflict have hardened many hearts on this island. The atrocities have followed each other with such sickening regularity that we have become almost inured to our own inhumanity.”

That outrage was echoed in Belfast by The Irish News, which said: “The pain goes on for all those left behind to grieve for them. Every time the killers invade someone’s home to visit death upon a family, they inflict more agony on a people who have already had their fill.”

Now Julie’s poem dedicated to Diarmuid and published in the Irish News after his death eerily echoes the tragic tale of Romeo and Juliet who could not bear to live without each other:

In the darkness you are my clair de lune

In the noise you are my peace and calm

In troubled times you are my greatest comfort

When I hold you all seems right with the world

And I will love you forever no matter what.