THE rain and wind swept around a small Wexford church as one of four young women killed in a devastating car crash last week was remembered.

At the Church of the Annunciation in Clonard, hundreds of mourners, still stunned, poured in to say a final farewell to 19-year-old Sorcha Rose McLoughlin.

McLoughlin died last Tuesday night on the N17 on the Galway-Mayo border. Three college friends, all travelling in the same car, also died that night: 19-year-old Teresa Molloy, 20-year-old Sarah Byrne and 19-year-old Marie Stephanie Conneely. The four women were third-year language students at NUI Galway.

Conneely's funeral took place yesterday. Fr Sean McHugh told the huge congregation who had packed Cill Treasa Church in Rossaveal an hour before the mass started that the area was shocked by the deaths of the four young women.

Hundreds more braved the wind and rain outside the church as the mass, which was said in Irish, was broadcast on speakers erected in the church grounds.

"People are shocked and saddened by what has happened this week and our hearts go out to Noirín and Noel and her brothers Ciarán and Padraig Francis.

"They have been asked to carry a very heavy cross," said McHugh. "It is hard to come to terms with the death of a young person who had so much to live for."

Sorcha McLoughlin was also remembered yesterday in the small Wexford parish of Clonard: "The life of Sorcha was a tapestry of relationships," said celebrant Fr Martin Doyle, acknowledging her family, friends and everyone else she came in contact with in her short life.

"Their welfare and concerns were her welfare and concerns. She had a maturity beyond her years."

She was the young entrepreneur who at the tender age of 12 had set up "Sorcha's Summer School" for young children. She was the woman passionate about her charity work for Downs Syndrome. And she was more.

"She was deeply loved and trusted by her friends and neighbours," said Doyle. "She was described as the mother hen of the students in that university.

"She has taken that part of you that she loved with her to God and so you are and always will be connected to her. Love doesn't die, people do. Love doesn't die.

"So nothing and nobody can steal the love that you have for Sorcha and she had for you. Not even in death."

Her father Tom addressed the congregation, sharing the good times and the bad. He recalled that moment every parent dreads, when the sergeant knocked on the door "and told us in a very professional way, the news, the tragic news, that our little girl had been taken away".

"She had so many friends and they all told me the same thing; that she was loving, that she was caring; she was great craic," he said.

Concluding his sermon, Doyle quoted JM Barrie, the author of Peter Pan and said: "God gave us memories so that we might have roses in December. "I pray today that the golden and treasured memories you have for Sorcha will be like roses in the winter months of your grief."

Sorcha Rose McLoughlin will be removed to Dereens in Achill, Co Mayo, for a final funeral mass today before being laid to rest at Glencoe Cemetery.