Louise Geaney
A double tragedy has left a west Cork community mourning a woman and her son after they died in a house fire.
Ms Kathy Hurley (89) and her son Jeremiah (49) were sleeping upstairs in their farmhouse cottage at Shanacrane Cross near Dunmanway when the blaze broke out in the early hours of yesterday morning.
The alarm was raised when a neighbour living across the road spotted the fire at the two-storey house on his way to work.
Mr Seán Hurley and his son Colman tried to enter the burning house to rescue the pair but were prevented from doing so by the intensity of the flames.
They immediately contacted the emergency services, which arrived to the scene in a matter of minutes, but despite their efforts were unable to save the mother and son.
Both were pronounced dead at the scene, much to the dismay of stunned neighbours.
"We broke a window where Jeremiah was sleeping but we just got inside it, we couldn't make it any further," Mr Seán Hurley said.
"We drove the front door in but only got as far as the porch, we couldn't do anything with the smoke."
According to locals in the Shanacrane Cross community, Ms Hurley was due to celebrate her 90th birthday in a couple of weeks and was a well-known figure in the area.
"She was nearly 90 and a great historian," one neighbour said. "Really, they were lovely people and you'd often see them walking the roads together, they wouldn't have been able to survive without each other."
The cottage was cordoned off yesterday as forensic officers from the Garda Technical Bureau began a technical examination of the scene.
The bodies were removed from the scene and taken to Cork University Hospital for a post-mortem examination.
While the cause of the fire remains uncertain, gardaí are investigating the possibility that a fault in an electric blanket may have sparked the blaze.
"It's a shocking situation for the people and local neighbourhood," Supt Noel Galwey said, adding that gardaí were treating the fire as accidental.