Firefighter tells of arriving on scene and witnessing mayhem

A FIREFIGHTER has described some of the horrific scenes he and colleagues witnessed in the immediate aftermath of Sunday’s mayhem in Dublin.

Colin Kershaw and fellow workers were travelling from a nearby unrelated incident and first came across the carnage as they came off the Red Cow roundabout.

As they got to the turn just before Bluebell, he said, they saw a garda squad car practically in two halves in the middle of the road.

“The gardaí were standing out on the side of the road. In fairness to them, they climbed out of the car themselves, one guy had to get out the window and there was just bits of the car everywhere,” he said.

“There were two east Europeans in another car, which had been hit at the same scene so we pulled up there first just to make sure everything was alright,” he told Joe Duffy on RTÉ Radio One’s Liveline programme yesterday.

He explained that they had to disconnect the batteries of the cars as there was material coming out of some of them. As they were disconnecting the battery on the garda car, firefighters heard gardaí being warned over their radio system to be careful if they did apprehend the bus driver as it was possible that he might have a weapon.

“God only knows how many garda cars he wrote off, the ones that we attended to will never be on the road again. The car was like a banana,” Mr Kershaw said.

He also told Liveline listeners about a colleague who was told his sister had a lucky escape after being saved from serious injury by the gardaí.

“She was taken out of one of the cars just at the Bluebell junction, they opened the door, dragged her out of the car and told her to get over the wall. Just as she did that the bus came up and rammed her car,” he said.

Mr Kershaw paid tribute to his own senior officers and other emergency service personnel for their smooth handling of the operation.

“There were ambulances diverted by our control room from every stretch of the city. We were really stretched for resources but the lads in the control room and the commands that were being given on scene by our staff were second to none. I never experienced anything that ran so well even thought it was such a bad scene,” he said.