JT showed what the unquenchable human spirit can achieve

Yesterday, in the early hours of a County Limerick summer night, a great struggle fought with inspiring tenacity against the grimmest of odds came to its honourable and inevitable close.

Some three years and four months since his fall at Cheltenham John Thomas McNamara came to journey’s end, having travelled the most harrowing of highways and endured suffering both mental and physical that should lie beyond the capacity of mere mortals.

So it is a time for sadness and it would be a flint heart that did not open to the pain that will be felt by JT’s wife Caroline and their three young children, Dylan, Harry and Olivia, for whom the bright sky of having both a mum and dad is now forever clouded.