‘I was able to jump out and am lucky to be alive’

LUCKY to be alive: Shaken motorists repeated the words over and over as they recalled their terrifying encounter with the rampaging bus driver who brought chaos to the capital city.

Nomeriano Rivera, 32, and Renato Claribo, 41, sat on the roadside nursing bruises and visibly swollen cut legs after their six-year -old Ford Escort was shunted backwards and sideways into the central divide on the Naas Road.

The two men, originally from the Philippines but now living in Co Dublin, were on their way home from playing a basketball match when they were caught up in the horror. Almost an hour later, they were still sitting on the ground beside their wrecked car, waiting for help.

Gardaí who rescued colleagues from the battered squad car a few yards further up the road had offered to call an ambulance but the friends knew much worse had happened in the moments after the bus hit them and they didn’t feel they were a priority.

“We’re waiting for our wives to come,” said Renato, who works at St Michael’s Hospital in Dun Laoghaire. “They will take us to hospital. We thought we were OK but we are starting to feel the pain now.

“I didn’t see the bus clearly, just that it was a tour bus. It was on the other side of the road, on the tram lines, and then suddenly it crossed to the road. The garda car tried to stop it but it was pushing it out of the way. It pushed the garda car away and then hit us.

“We are so lucky that we were far in on the side of the road because it just bumped us,” said Nomeriano, who works for a nursing home in Dun Laoghaire and was driving the car when they were hit.

“If we were out further in the road, it would have hit us straight on and we could have been killed,” he said.

Further down the road, another motorist was surveying the damage in disbelief that he had escaped unhurt.

James McElroy, 27, was on his way to play golf when the bus struck the queue of cars he was in at Bluebell.

“I saw people getting out of their cars and then he flew up the way, went through everybody,” he said

“Thanks be to God I was back here, or, otherwise he would have hit me. I’d say he was driving about 60 miles an hour,” said Mr McElroy.

“I just tried getting the car back into reverse. He bashed through everything. All I could see was just people jumping out of their cars and over the rails by the Luas. I was wondering what was going on.

“Then I saw smoke and cars beginning to reverse back and then I saw this bus followed by a good four or five police cars. The woman in front of me, she was flung out of the car. Now she’s dead.”

“I was going down to play a game of golf. I was taking it easy and then this happened.”

Another man, called Fortunate, who was still breathless trying to recover after the terror, said: “It all happened in a matter of seconds. There was this white bus just hitting the cars and I was able to jump out and am lucky to be alive.

“I’m shocked. A friend of mine is injured and he went to hospital.”