"Thank you God for mammy and daddy, " they would pray. "Thank you God for our new house and the car and God bless granddaddy."

Leanne and Shania would, most likely, have observed the same ritual before retiring to bed in their shared pink room for the final time in their short lives. The one departure from their routine had come a year ago. Until then, Leanne used to say her nightly prayers over the disability-friendly "talking phone" with her grandfather, Hughie, in Forristalstown, speaking in the incongruous American accent she had developed from watching TV cartoons. After Hughie Dunne, a sightless musician in his 50s with a luxuriant beard still sprinkled with more pepper than salt, died suddenly of a heart attack on 9 April last year, his two granddaughters prayed faithfully for him each night. Then the girls, who called each other "Sis", would cross the hall to their bedroom, adjacent to their parents', where their pretty frocks hung in twin fabric Barbie wardrobes, a present from Ciara and Adrian last Christmas.

Though they were prayerful people, the Dunnes were not regular church-goers and so, when they did not appear for Sunday mass last weekend, their absence was unremarkable.

Later that day, the parish priest, Fr William Cosgrave, got no answer when he called to their detached bungalow looking out over a tapestry of fields speckled with grazing sheep and, beyond, to Mount Leinster. The blue Micra was parked in front and the washing was billowing on the clothesline. The ceiling light in the hallway was on, as always. It was a peculiarity the neighbours had grown accustomed to after the family came to live there at the start of last summer, assuming it was normal for the home of a visuallyimpaired family.

'You'll Never Walk Alone' Adrian Dunne was registered blind. He had inherited a severe cataract condition which deteriorated as he got older until the last vestiges of his sight disappeared about seven years ago.

He availed of neither a white stick nor a guide dog. His wife, though she too suffered from serious sight impairment, was his eyes. It was Ciara who used to undo the hatch in the hall ceiling to retrieve Christmas presents and playthings from their storage in the attic . . . Adrian was found hanging in that same hallway on Monday.

It was Ciara who drove the car. She became a familiar figure manoeuvring her way through the small Wexford village, sitting close to the steering wheel to peer through the windscreen. To while away the miles, Leanne (5) and Shania (3) often provided entertainment from the back seat with their word-perfect rendition of the Liverpool football anthem 'You'll Never Walk Alone'.

Adrian was a zealous Liverpool supporter.

"If there was a match on, you'd never see him, " says Laura Furlong, a 17-year-old neighbour and family friend from four doors away. "Ciara supported Liverpool too but she didn't watch the matches. She would be busy doing things."

When they were planning the decor for their bedroom, Adrian wanted wrap-around red and white walls finished with Liverpool's official wallpaper border. Ciara suggested a compromise:

one half of the room to be decorated in the club colours; the other half to convey a more romantic mood, with doves painted on the wall behind the headboard as a symbol of their love for one another.

In the eerily empty, shuttered house, where fresh flowers and teddy bears huddle in tribute on the exterior window-ledge of the children's bedroom, the Liverpool FC border paper is pristine on all four walls of their parents' room next door.

Car accident Perhaps the seeds of the couple's catastrophic fear, that their happy family would be annihilated in a road crash, were sown last October. Ciara was driving back to the house one day when she accidentally drove the Micra into a ditch at the entrance to Moin Rua, the neat estate where they made their last home.

There was no harm done but her passengers, three local girls, were taken to hospital to be checked out. On hearing news of the crash, her parents immediately got into their car in Burt, Donegal, and drove to Wexford.

"Her parents came to see us in the hospital and stayed until we were released, " says Laura Furlong, who was the front-seat passenger. "I didn't get out until around eight o'clock the next morning but Ciara waited for me all night. She slept on the chairs in the hospital until I got out. She said if we wanted to claim off her insurance there was no problem even though we didn't. She was very kind. She was a bit nervous driving for about a week after that but then she was off again just like before.

"I liked Adrian a lot as well. He was set in his ways. He never drank tea from a mug, only from his long plastic Coca Cola glass or his Budweiser glass. If there was one thing about him that annoyed me a bit it was that he had to know something about everything. If there was a conversation going on and he wasn't in it he'd still have to have his say. I remember we were talking about Fr Grennan one day and Adrian started saying that he didn't believe what people said about him and that it was easy to say it now he was dead."

Fr Jim Grennan was the Ferns diocesan priest who put the small village of Monageer on the map of place names made recognisable by tragedy. In 1988, he sexually assaulted 11 schoolgirls aged 10 and 11 on the church altar while preparing them for confirmation. After three weeks' enforced exile, the priest returned to the parish church side by side with the bishop on the day of the confirmations, provoking two families into a walkout.

Most controversially, the Garda file on the investigation mysteriously disappeared and no charges were brought. After that, Grennan regularly raped an altar boy from the village, who later attempted suicide, until the alcoholic priest's death in 1994. Finally, at mass in Monageer church in June 2002, Bishop Eamon Walsh formally apologised to the parishioners for Grennan's crimes.

By coincidence, Grennan's last posting as a curate before being promoted to Monageer parish priest had been at Adrian Dunne's local church in Poulpeasty (between Enniscorthy and New Ross). At the time of his birth on 7 January 1978, the large Dunne family had been living in Ferns but moved to a remote house in their father's native Forristalstown, near Clonroche, when Adrian was six. By the time of the move, he had already commenced school in Ferns, where he and Ciara were planning to send fiveyear-old Leanne next September.

Falling 'madly in love' Adrian transferred to Rathnure national school and then to Our Lady of Fatima Special School in Waterford city and completed a post-Leaving Cert course in journalism at Enniscorthy Vocational College. Around the turn of the millennium, he and an older brother, Cornelius, secured places in the Training and Enterprise Centre in New Ross, a special-needs outlet under the aegis of the now defunct National Rehabilitation Board. Adrian did not stay there long. While Cornelius stayed on, the younger brother moved to Dublin where he got a place on a media studies course run by Rehab in Stillorgan. It was there that he met Ciara, a childcare student.

"They fell madly in love, " according to a mutual friend. "Ciara wasn't the sort of girl who trusted people easily. She had to get to know you before she would trust you but once she did you were fast friends."

She came from a well-to-do family; one of two sons and two daughters born to Marian and PJ O'Brien. Her uncle is a well-known property developer. When Ciara became pregnant with Leanne (named after Ciara's sister), the couple moved to Donegal but soon returned to Wexford.

Despite her distinctive soft Donegal accent, Ciara became an avid Wexford hurling fan and, in a gesture typical of her fondness for symbolism, she festooned the Micra in the county colours for St Patrick's Day last month.

For a while, they lived in Bree, a scattered rural hinterland of Enniscorthy favoured by Dubliners relocating to the countryside. The spacious, detached house is now occupied by a family from the capital. The sight of their small, sun-lit children running between the cherry blossom trees in the long garden evokes thoughts of what might have been for the Dunnes.

While in Bree, Adrian planned a surprise wedding. He notified his family to turn up in their best clothes on new year's eve in 2005. On the appointed morning, he woke Ciara and had her drive them to the church where, to her pleasure, they were married in the local church. Thereafter, Ciara wore a Claddagh ring on her wedding finger, an Atlantic coast custom. (A priest who answered a knock on the presbytery door in Bree on Thursday declined to comment on the wedding. ) Always together Adrian was one for hatching surprises. Another time, he and Ciara put the children in the car, drove to the airport and never told them where they were going until they were greeted by Mickey and Minnie Mouse at the gates of Disneyland, Paris. The children returned to Monageer after a week laden with Cinderella and Rapunzel dolls.

"They were mammy's and daddy's pets, " says a weeping neighbour, Stasia Furlong. "They never strayed. They were good little girls. Only once did Adrian ever smack one of them and that was only a tap. It was Leanne. She said sorry and he hugged her.

"They adored those children. Adrian didn't like them playing with other children that might be using bad language and he tried to stop it but we said, 'You're living in an estate now and that's how it is'."

From the start in Monageer, the Dunnes went everywhere together. In the summer, they brought the girls to the children's afternoon disco in the Monageer Tavern at weekends.

When Ciara went to the gym in Gorey every week to try to lose weight, Adrian and the girls went with her and waited in the car. They exuded a sense of self-sufficiency, except for Adrian's "constant phone calls" to a woman called Sarah.

"He spent hours on the phone to her nearly every day. They were always talking about Liverpool. He even sent her credit for her mobile phone, " recalls Laura Furlong. "I asked Ciara one day if she was jealous and she said, 'No, I love Adrian and I know he loves me.' Ciara would talk to her sometimes too. It's just that he was always on the phone to her."

Laura speculates that this might be the same Sarah nominated in the couple's instructions to Cooney's undertakers as the children's guardian in the event of their own deaths. (Laura Furlong points out that the mobile phone number recorded for Ciara in the instructions was, in fact, Adrian's, though Ciara did have her own phone. ) On Thursday 29 March last, Adrian Dunne's newfound happiness evaporated with the news that his older brother, James, had hanged himself in the family home at Forristalstown. It is believed that he did not leave a note of explanation.

Twenty-two days later, Adrian and Ciara, accompanied by Leanne and Shania, arrived in New Ross to make their funeral arrangements with undertaker Johanna Cooney. Clearly, the parents expected that they would all die soon. Yet nobody from a state authority ever spoke to them again. The gruesome discovery of their bodies . . . Adrian in the hall, Ciara and the girls in the sittingroom where they used to eat their dinner . . . has left their neighbours, their community and the country grappling to understand why.

Ciara Dunne gave no impression of a woman planning to die. The new tiles for the hall floor had arrived. She was talking about extending the back of the house. She wanted more children, "a whole football team of them".

"Are you pregnant?" Stasia Furlong, her neighbour, asked her last Christmas over tea in the Dunnes' house, six-foot Santas and giant reindeer illuminated on the roof in seasonal joie de vivre.

Ciara confided that not alone was she not pregnant but that she lived in fear that any future children would inherit the visual impairment that she and Adrian had passed on to Leanne and Shania.

"They just wanted the world to be perfect for their children, " says Laura.