Remembering the human trauma behind the 135 road deaths recorded in Ireland so far this year

Loraine Fehilly knew why the gardaí were calling to her house on a Saturday evening in January three years ago.

Just a few hours earlier at their home near Clonmel in Co Tipperary, her husband, Maurice, had pulled on his motorcycle gear before heading out on a road trip to Limerick with two friends. It was a beautiful sunny day.

“I said ‘Oh, you haven’t had your lunch,’ and he said, ‘We’re coming straight back,’” recalls Loraine of the last words they exchanged. Soon afterwards her brother-in-law came to tell her about the crash.

“The guards arrived down and I answered the front door. I said: ‘I know what you’re going to tell me,’” she remembers. They left a contact number. “That was it, a blur after that.”

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Maurice was killed in a collision on the road outside the village of Dromkeen on the N24 shortly before 5pm.

He was pronounced dead at the scene. One of his friends, who was uninjured in the incident, had sat beside him in a ditch after the crash, talking to him until the emergency services arrived.

The third man, who lost half his leg in the crash, died of an illness earlier this year. The same friend sat beside him, too, during his last moments in hospital.

Loraine speaks lovingly of her 54-year-old husband whose death continues to affect her and their three adult children. She says Maurice was driving bikes when they met in the 1980s. There was a motorcycle procession to the crematorium after his funeral. Loraine has a picture of him on his beloved Harley Davidson, presented to her shortly afterwards.

“It’s the ripple effect [of his death],” she says. “I just don’t know why the message isn’t getting across because the devastation that these [crashes] cause… the devastation and the ripple effect.”

Maurice’s sister Jackie speaks about the inability to escape the pain. “Sometimes you think that you’re okay and that you’re moving on a little bit,” Jackie explains, “but then you go back again. It’s like you are reliving the thing all over again.”

The Fehilly family received support from Parc, the road safety advocacy group, for which such tragedies are all too common.

By Monday there were 135 road deaths recorded in Ireland so far this year, the majority of them drivers, followed by pedestrians. Last year’s death toll was 136, although that was a record annual low, in part because of the reduced traffic numbers during the pandemic.

Whatever about statistics, the human trauma will be evident across Ireland this Sunday on the World Day of Remembrance for road crash victims. It will be launched by the Road Safety Authority (RSA) with a commemorative event in the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin on Tuesday.

Michael O’Neill was at the fore of bringing the event, which was first adopted by the United Nations general assembly in 2005, to Ireland. The following year he spotted something about it online, five years after the death of his daughter whose anniversary happens to fall on the same day.

On a November afternoon in 2001, Fiona O’Neill (21) and her boyfriend, Dominic Wogan (23), were killed in a collision near her home in Monasterboice, Co Louth just an hour before they were due to leave for Australia.

“You relive the whole 21 years on that particular day,” Michael says of the anniversary. “The Mass on Sunday, to me, it’s keeping them with us, Dominic and Fiona with us. They are not forgotten and never will be.

“It’s very important to remember our loved ones and on Sunday we don’t just remember those who have died, we remember those who have been injured, their families. It’s not a Sunday for blaming anybody, it’s just a Sunday for remembering victims of road crashes.”