THE grainy images on the mobile phone show a normal, lively schoolboy joking and playing with his friends. Mark O'Neill, 11, play-wrestles his friend Cillian. In one scene he asks Cillian for the time and when Cillian looks down at his watch, Mark jumps on him and they fall to the ground laughing.

The footage was shot at 7pm on Tuesday 30 January 2007. Two hours later, Mark was found dead on his bedroom floor by his mother Lisa. He had hanged himself.

For his family, there is only one question that can never be answered - why? The schoolboy had shown no signs of depression or anxiety, they say.

That day, "he came home from school the way he did every day", says his grandfather, Frank.

"Depressed or upset about anything - that'd be the last thing you'd say of him."

Lisa, a single mother, found Mark slumped against his bed, unconscious, in their home at Rosbrien, Limerick. She phoned for an ambulance and then, distraught, phoned Frank, who lives around the corner. Frank ran around to her house, barefoot.

"I went up to him and he was lying on the ground, " says Frank. "There wasn't a doubt in my head that he was dead."

The ambulance arrived and the paramedics tried to resuscitate Mark in vain. "They knew what they were doing was futile, but they were not giving up." Frank and Lisa speak appreciatively of the work and consideration of the paramedics, and of the gardaí.

The family came home from the hospital at around 2am on Wednesday. By 8am, there were reports of the death on the local radio, and these were followed in the newspapers. "They said the guards were 'investigating', " says Lisa. "And then, that there was 'no foul play suggested'. It was horrendous.

"I can't go into the local shops without people pointing. One paper didn't even have the decency to get my name right. There were pictures of my house on the front of the newspaper. A friend took me to get my hair done (later in the week), just to get me out of the house, and there I was, looking at my name staring out of all the papers.

"This is about my little boy, and how my heart is broken, and I'm dealing with that as well? "We're very private people. Our privacy was invaded last week, while we were trying to keep us together as a family, trying to keep from shouting and screaming at each other. It took away a little of me remembering him as I wanted to remember him."

Media reports after Mark's death said he had been found hanging in his bedroom. This was untrue. The family are distressed by the image that has been created of the hanging.

"We don't know how he died, " says Lisa, "but everybody else knows. His 10-year-old friend came in here last Sunday. He gave me a vivid description of what Mark had done." She is angry that Mark's friends should have been confronted with an inaccurate image of his death.

It was widely reported that Mark had received a critical school report the day he killed himself.

Both the school principal, Pat Hanley, and Mark's family, have said this is untrue. Lisa and Frank have nothing but praise for Mark's teacher, who is a young man at the start of his career. He had "coaxed and coached" Mark, they say. Lisa recalls this year's parent-teacher meeting. "This was the first year in a long time that a teacher had nothing but praise for Mark." She went to find Mark in the schoolyard afterwards, to tell him how proud of him she was.

Speaking to the Sunday Tribune in Frank's house at Ballinacurra Gardens in Rosbrien, they are hugely appreciative of the support they have received from friends and neighbours, and even from many people they don't know. There have been hundreds of letters and cards. "Some don't even have stamps on them, they just put 'The O'Neill Family' and the postman knows where to go."

The mantelpiece in the living room has become a chaotic memorial to Mark. On top of a silver model of a motorbike (the closest Frank has got to buying an actual motorbike) hangs Mark's Glengarry hat, from his uniform for the CBS Pipe Band, in which he was a snare drummer. The hat had been placed on his coffin for the funeral by his band colleagues.

Behind the hat is perched a school copybook, open at a picture drawn in pencil by Mark, of a round tower being attacked by sea-borne invaders. Art was Mark's passion at school.

"Academics - you could forget about that, " laughs Lisa. But he had been singled out at school for his artistic ability, and was the first in the class to learn the technique of perspective.

Beside the copybook is the poem that Mark's 10-year-old friend from the pipe band, Noel, wrote for him. On the wall above the mantelpiece are two brightly-coloured, celebratory collages made for Mark by his classmates, and a host of family photographs.

They are an unpretentious, straight-talking, warm family. Frank, the grandfather, is a barrel of a man, with a barrel-load of stories. He tells a litany of anecdotes about Mark, all describing a cheeky, outgoing, independent young fellow.

Mark's aunts and uncles chip in details and memories. Frank's youngest daughter, Stephanie, is 16, just five years older than Mark. "There were seven of us in the family, that's the way we looked at it. We're more like one family than three generations of a family, " says Frank.

There are stories of long summers in their mobile home in Kerry, collecting periwinkles, swimming daily in the incoming tide, Mark constantly bringing new friends in to raid the fridge, Mark turning his phone to 'silent' so as to be able to ignore the calls summoning him home at night. Stories of Mark loving to dress up when going into town, wearing his Ferrari shirt and his grandad's aftershave. Of how he demanded to go on the Big Wheel at the carnival in Limerick, but spent the ride terrified, and got a ragging from his grandad and uncle for not living up to the GI Joe T-shirt he was proudly wearing. Of how he brought home a puppy one day, after Lisa had said he couldn't have one, and smuggled it into the house inside his jacket.

And sometimes, Frank falters. A story trails off, and he stands, helpless for a moment. And then Lisa comes in with one of her own memories, told more quietly, but with a smile. And sometimes, the room goes silent for a moment.

Lisa has been staying with Frank at Ballinacurra Gardens. They visit her own house, around the corner at Greenfields. "I go over there most days, and light a fire, " says Frank.

"Today was hard. It was the first time the futility of it really hit me."I don't doubt there's worse days ahead of us.

"In six months' time, we'll still be sitting here, after a few drinks, thinking why did he do this.

We'll be asking these questions for the rest of our lives. We'll get no answers. Hopefully, we'll only be asking them for a short while, and then we'll move on."

The family has experienced tragedy before.

Eleven years ago, Frank's wife Mary died suddenly of meningitis. Mark's funeral echoed that of Mary. Lisa lists off the itinerary: "Thompsons, the Dominicans, Mungret (the funeral home, church and cemetery) - everything was the same for us."

Mark was six months old when Mary died. "He helped us through all of that, " says Frank. "Something else will come along now, and help us through this. People say, 'you've had it tough'. But we didn't have it tough. We had great times in between all these things."

Frank is determined to lead his family through this. "We have to close ranks and stay together as a family. And we'll do that as best as we can.

We have to get on with it, and not be afraid to go out and live. When a mist comes over the mountains, sit down and have a rest. And when you can, get on (with life) and enjoy it. We're not going down into a hole, and have to dig ourselves out.

We'll start from the ground and build from there."

Lisa echoes his resolve. "If you get up in the morning bitter, you won't be able to get up and dressed. You get up in the morning and, as upset as you feel, you take a deep breath and keep on going."

"We'll start tonight, " says Frank. "We're going to go over and paint the house, and everybody can put a bit of paint on the wall. Eoin (Mark's uncle) and his pal are putting down a new wooden floor for him. We're going to put a bit of life back into the house. Dress the beds, put new curtains up."

"To make it a place I can just go, and sit and talk to him, " says Lisa. "It feels like he packed 20 years into 11 years, for all the memories we have of him."