A homecoming of mercy: The charity that returns Ireland’s dead

Jan 3, 2026 / 07:00 am (CNA).

The Christmas season in Ireland is marked by the return of family members living abroad and by the strong tradition of visiting family graves.

Those themes of returning home and respect for the deceased lie at the heart of the work of one of Ireland’s most remarkable and humane charities, the Kevin Bell Repatriation Trust (KBRT). Since it was founded in 2013, the trust has brought home the bodies of more than 2,000 Irish people who have died abroad in sudden and tragic circumstances. The trust typically has three or four repatriations underway at any given time.

The trust was founded by Colin and Eithne Bell and their family in memory of their son Kevin, who was killed in a hit-and-run accident in New York on June 16, 2013. To help the Bell family with the substantial expense of repatriating Kevin’s body to his family, the local community in the town of Newry rallied around the family and raised over $202,000 toward the costs.

Colin Bell told CNA: “Kevin was 26 years old, who loved life, enjoyed travel. He had been in Australia and Thailand. He had gone to New York. He enjoyed everything about New York. He went out on a Saturday evening for some drinks, took a cab home, and when he got out of the taxi, he was struck by a speeding white van, which knocked him into the road, where he was struck by another vehicle. Both vehicles drove off.” He was killed instantly.

Colin added: “I suppose mercifully, Kevin would have known nothing about it.”

“And when Kevin came home, it was obvious that Newry too had lost a son with the reaction to the news that broke,” he continued. “I can only describe it as Newry came around us like a blanket. In the space of a week, 150,000 pounds [$202,000] was raised to bring Kevin home.”

Coincidentally, at this time, the son of a Belfast family, Steven Clifford, was killed in Thailand. “We contacted the family and said, ‘Look, we have this money; we’ll pay to bring your son home.’”

The following week, a young man from Sligo died in Las Vegas. “So again, we reached out to the family. Because we had 150,000 pounds, which really wasn’t ours. We thought we would use this to help other families who had been visited with the same devastation. We thought once the 150,000 pounds was gone, that would be the end of it. But the parents of another young man killed in Perth heard that we were doing this and they had something in the region of 75,000 pounds, which they gave us to continue our work.”

“We decided then that we would make this Kevin’s legacy,” Bell said.

Gaining charitable status in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland led to Irish embassies and consulates worldwide asking for details so that when a bereaved family contacts the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin, they are given the trust’s number.

The repatriation process is complicated and expensive. To bring somebody from Australia can cost 8,000 or 9,000 pounds ($10,500 to $12,000). From mainland Europe, it is generally in the region of 5,000 to 6,000 pounds ($6,700 to $8,000). Bringing a body from the U.S. to Ireland is anything up to to 10,000 pounds or more ($13,500+) depending on what part of the country the body is repatriated from.

The Bell family understands what bereaved families are experiencing.

“Obviously if you get a cold call and you are told that you’ve lost a son or a daughter in Sydney, for example, what do you do? Who do you turn to? How do you go about getting your loved one home? I think that’s probably the biggest part of the work that we do because when a family does contact us we’re able to say, look we’ll take it from here, you don’t have to do anything. We’ll organize it and we’ll get your loved one home.”

Bell further explained: “From a faith perspective, one of the corporal works of mercy is to bury the dead, and the spiritual works of mercy ask us to comfort the sorrowful, which the trust does. It doesn’t matter if you’re at home or abroad — loss is loss and pain is pain, but particularly Irish people want their loved ones home. To want to be able to give the family a way to see their loved one is most important. I know it was very, very important to us.”

Bell said he remembers when his son’s body arrived home and his coffin was carried into the house, there was “a sense of peace that came with knowing that he was home. That was so important to us, especially his mummy [who] was able to hold his hand and speak to him.”

Bell described the work as therapeutic, especially as it keeps his son’s name alive.

As far as he knows, KBRT is the only repatriation organization in the world. The trust’s logo is an image of a bird.

“The last Christmas before Kevin went away, the last present that he got for his mother was a bird table. As Eithne says, birds come home to nest or to roost,” Bell said.

And what might Kevin have made of this work of mercy done in his name?

“Kevin was a big character who loved life and always said that he would be famous. So in a way his name is out there and it’s well known throughout the world. I’m sure he’d be very pleased with that fact.”

Source: https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/268827/a-homecoming-of-mercy-the-charity-that-returns-ireland-s-dead