THE PRECISE cause of a house blaze which claimed the lives of three young brothers cannot be identified, the inquests into their deaths heard yesterday.
The efforts of their mother Kathleen McDonagh to try and get back into the house to rescue her children were outlined at Drogheda Coroner’s Court during evidence which was so upsetting to listen to that she and her husband Anthony left early.
Their sons James (8), Tony jnr (16) and Martin (21) all perished in the blaze in their home in the Moneymore estate in the early hours of March 16th last. Another brother Eddie (13) was badly injured.
State Pathologist Prof Marie Cassidy concluded their deaths were due to smoke inhalation and fire gases. Their three-bed terraced home was gutted.
Two of their sisters should have been in the house but had spent the night at another sister’s house. However, it took some time to ascertain who exactly had been there at the time of the fire, coroner Ronan Maguire was told.
The inquest heard the deposition of Kathleen McDonagh who said that the previous night the boys had gone to bed and she and her husband were in the living room until about 2am as Anthony was listening to music.
When a few hours later he woke her to say there was a fire, her first thoughts were for her son James who had been sleeping in their bed in their downstairs bedroom.
She said he would often go upstairs to his big brother’s bedroom during the night and when Kathleen woke she realised he was no longer in her bed.
She said: “I was panicking and there was so much smoke coming from the sitting room.” She tried to go upstairs, “but the heat was too much and I called for the children but I never heard their voices”. The heat and smoke forced her out the back door but she then ran back into the house.
Her son Eddie (13) had jumped out of a top floor window to escape. He described how Tony had opened their bedroom window for air because of the intensity of the smoke. He has no memory of jumping from the top window but said, “the legs of my trousers were on fire and I kept trying to get up and into the house but the neighbours wouldn’t let me”.
The courageous efforts of neighbours – including Patrick Faulkner and John Connor who tried to get a ladder up to the top window to rescue Martin, who had special needs – were outlined.
“We got the ladder to within 3ft of the window . . . the heat was too intense to go up,” Mr Faulkner said.
The coroner recorded verdicts of accidental death and said: “I am struck by the extent that the parents tried to get back into the house to try to save their children.
“It was an appalling tragedy and my words cannot do justice to the loss they have suffered.”