The returned: The Department of Foreign Affairs last night continued its attempts to establish the whereabouts of six Irish nationals as more holidaymakers affected by hurricane Katrina began to arrive home to Dublin Airport yesterday.
Among these were newly-wed couple, Jean and Michael Leydon, who told how looters, street gangs and soldiers flanked flooded streets as they fled from their hotel.
The couple, from Dromahair, Co Leitrim, joined hundreds of other holidaymakers in a bid to flee New Orleans. "We decided as a group that we would walk the streets together block by block, not lose anybody along the way, and we would make our way to the convention centre," Ms Leydon said.
But along the two-mile journey near Canal Street, police warned them to steer clear of the Superdome and convention centre.
"We had to walk past the convention centre and it was scary," Mr Leydon told RTÉ Radio. "We heard comments as we were passing, you know, we can take them. We saw knives being flicked." They took the advice of police who warned them to steer clear of the Superdome and convention centre.
Gangs were said to be taking control of areas with little law or order in the dome.
The pair, along with the rest of the group were eventually taken to relative safety where their luck changed. A reporter spotted the Irish couple and offered to take them out of New Orleans.
They were driven from the city by the news crew along with two other couples after wading across sewage-covered roads. The couple recalled how disaster struck early on Monday morning last week, leaving 1,400 guests, employees and their families stranded in the hotel.
"There was no sanitation in the hotel. They had actually brought in the employees' families and they were staying in the hotel. There were dogs roaming the corridors," said Mr Leydon.
The couple recalled seeing a 94-year-old woman in urgent need of medical care forced to sleep on the street. The pair said their group also had to barricade themselves in on a street corner in a bid to keep out looters.
The former minister for justice and member of the European Court of Auditors, Máire Geoghegan Quinn, yesterday described how she endured a four-day wait before hearing that her son, Ruairí, and his family were safe.
Her son, a building contractor who moved to Pasca Goula, near Biloxi, 12 years ago, stayed on in the area while his wife and five-month-old daughter were evacuated. "He only has four walls and a roof remaining now. He has lost everything," Ms Geoghegan Quinn told The Irish Times.
"But he said to me you know mum, we are very lucky. We have a roof and four walls. Others only have a pile of rubble."
A spokesman for the Department of Foreign Affairs last night said there were no reported fatalities or serious injuries among the estimated 75 Irish people thought to have been in the area affected by the hurricane.