The bells of Our Lady of the Nativity had barely stopped tolling for Alan McCluskey on Thursday when they began again on Saturday morning. Two funerals. Two coffins. Two best friends, inseparable in life, now carried into the same church within forty-eight hours of each other. Outside, the December sky hung low and bruised, as if the heavens themselves were in mourning for the boys who had lit up this small border town like twin comets.

Dylan Commins was 23 years old. He died in the same horrific single-vehicle collision on the N33 at Newtownstalaban in the early hours of Monday, 24 November 2025, that claimed the life of his passenger and soul-brother, Alan McCluskey, also 23. The white Volkswagen Golf GTI they were travelling in left the road, struck a tree, and burst into flames. There were no survivors.

By 10.45 a.m. on Saturday the church was full to bursting. Hundreds more stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the rain on the steps and the street beyond, phones held high to livestream the Mass for those who could not squeeze inside. Young men in black hoodies and spotless runners formed a guard of honour, their faces raw with grief. Motocross helmets – Dylan’s second skin – were lined up like silent sentinels along the altar rails.

Inside, the coffin was draped not in the traditional pall but in a chequered flag, the symbol of every victory lap Dylan ever took. On top rested a single red helmet, visor cracked from his last race, and a pair of driving gloves still dusted with the sawdust of the workshop he loved.

Fr Michael Murtagh, visibly shaken, told the congregation: “Dylan didn’t walk into a room – he detonated. Light, laughter, and adventure – those were the gifts he carried in his pockets and scattered everywhere he went. And when God decided the world had seen enough of that brightness for one lifetime, He brought him home.”

The Boy Who Refused to Be Ordinary

Dylan Patrick Commins was born on 17 May 2002 in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda, the second child of Paul and Karen Commins. From the moment he could walk, he ran. From the moment he could grip a handlebar, he flew.

At four he was on a PW50, tearing around the fields behind the family home on the Tierney Road. By ten he was Irish Youth Motocross Champion. By sixteen he had traded two wheels for four and built his first drift car in his father’s shed with nothing more than YouTube tutorials, borrowed tools, and a stubbornness that could move mountains.

He left school at seventeen – not because he couldn’t learn, but because books moved too slowly for a mind that thought in revs and apexes. Within a year he had founded DC Performance, a small tuning and valeting business that grew so fast he had to move from the back garden into a unit on the industrial estate. Customers came from Cork to Coleraine because “if Dylan touched your car, it didn’t just run better – it felt alive.”

“Everything he did, he did at two hundred miles an hour,” his older sister Lauren told the church through tears that refused to be silent. “He lived more in twenty-three years than most people do in ninety.”

The Brotherhood

If you saw one, you saw the other. Dylan and Alan McCluskey – “the twins that time forgot,” their mothers called them – met in national school and never looked back. They shared bedrooms on sleepovers, shared podiums at races, shared dreams that were too big for Ardee and too loud for anyone to ignore.

They bought matching Golf GTIs within weeks of each other. They fitted them side-by-side in the unit, engines screaming into the night while playlists of Calvin Harris and Nathan Dawe rattled the roller shutters. They promised each other that one day they would open a full-blown performance garage together – DC & AM Performance – with neon signs and a coffee dock and a drift track out the back.

On the night they died, they had been at a 23rd birthday celebration in Dundalk. Witnesses later said they left around 1.30 a.m., music still blaring, both of them stone-cold sober because “Dylan never drank if he was driving the GTI – that car was his religion.”

The last Snapchat Alan posted at 1.47 a.m. showed Dylan behind the wheel, grinning like a devil, caption: “Homeward bound with my brother. Life’s good.”

Twenty minutes later the car left the road on a bend gardaí have described simply as “unforgiving.”

The Gifts Brought Forward

There were no flowers by request – only photographs and trophies. A framed picture of Dylan hoisting the 2024 Irish Drift Championship Rookie of the Year trophy sat beside one of him and Alan, arms slung around each other, covered in champagne and mud at Mondello Park. Another showed a ten-year-old Dylan on the podium at Gormanston, helmet too big, smile too wide.

His youngest cousin, eight-year-old Jamie, carried forward a tiny replica of the ill-fated Golf, hand-painted white with the number 23 on the doors. The congregation dissolved.

Paul Commins – a man who had not slept since the knock on the door at 4.12 a.m. on Monday – stood at the lectern and somehow found words.

“My son never knew how to be half-speed,” he said, voice cracking like gravel under tyres. “He squeezed every drop out of life. He taught me that bravery isn’t the absence of fear – it’s flooring it when you’re terrified. I would give every tomorrow I have left to have one more yesterday with him. But Dylan wouldn’t want us crying in the pits. He’d want us to keep the revs high and the wheels turning.”

He ended with a promise that brought the church to its feet: “DC Performance stays open. The unit stays open. The dream stays alive. Because that’s what Dylan would do – he’d burn the clutch before he let the engine die.”

The Soundtrack of a Short Life

As the coffin was carried out, the organ fell silent. Instead, the opening bassline of “Sweet Disposition” by Temper Trap – the song Dylan had blasted at every victory lap, every late-night cruise, every sunrise over the Cooley Mountains – poured from speakers hidden in the choir loft.

Outside, a convoy of more than four hundred cars – drift cars, rally cars, superbikes, even a pair of tractors decked in chequered flags – waited to escort him on his final lap. Engines growled in a minute’s roar that shook the stained-glass windows. Grown men wept openly as the hearse turned onto the Tierney Road toward Shanlis Cemetery.

At the graveside, Dylan’s mechanic overalls were laid across the coffin. His best mate Shane gently placed a set of keys – the spare set to the wrecked GTI – into the earth.

“See you at the next green light, bro,” he whispered.

A Town in Black and Chequered

In the days since, Ardee has become a shrine. The gates of DC Performance are buried under flowers, Red Bull cans, and handwritten notes: “Keep the shiny side up, king.” The bend on the N33 where the crash happened is now lined with two white crosses, fairy lights, and fresh tyres laid every night by strangers who never even met them.

Teenagers who once raced their hatchbacks too fast have begun leaving the keys on the dash “for Dylan.” The local Garda superintendent says call-outs for speeding have plummeted – “the boys are scared straight by grief,” he admitted.

On Saturday night, hundreds gathered again – this time at the unit. They fired up every car Dylan had ever touched, revved them in perfect synchrony, and let the engines scream into the darkness until gardaí gently asked them to stop at 3 a.m. Nobody wanted the night to end.

The Legacy That Will Not Fade

Dylan Commins did not live long, but he lived loud. He built a business with his own hands, a reputation with his own heart, and a brotherhood that death cannot break. He proved that a small-town boy with big dreams and bigger courage can leave a mark deeper than any trophy.

His mother Karen stood outside the church long after the crowd had gone, touching the chequered flag one last time.

“He always said he wanted to burn bright and burn fast,” she said, voice barely audible above the wind. “Be careful what you wish for, I suppose.”

Then she smiled – the same fearless, dazzling smile that lives on in every photograph of her son.

Somewhere, engines are still revving. Somewhere, a white Golf is still flying. And in the hearts of an entire town, Dylan Commins is forever 23, forever sideways, forever smiling.

Rest in power, young king.