Devastated community seeks closure to a living nightmare

TWO empty, lightweight sea-craft lie moored to the harbour wall at Dunmore East, visible to all the locals who gather intermittently at the top of the street to look over the harbour and wonder when the bodies of the Pere Charles crew will be returned to the village.

The two small vessels are RIBs — Rigid Inflatable Boats — and belong to the Garda Water Unit and the navy.

They are used by the divers who will ultimately be given the task of going down to the wreck of the Pere Charles, when weather and sea conditions allow, hopefully today.

But there are no certainties. The sight of the two RIBs tied up in the shelter of the harbour sums up the frustration of the families of Pat Hennessy, Tom Hennessy, Pat Coady, Billy O’Connor, and Andriy Dyrin, as they wait for the weather gods to show some mercy and allow a dive to be completed which would bring back the bodies of their beloved men.

On and off, the garda and navy crews have ventured out into the choppy waters between Dunmore East and Hook Head, but as of yet — more than five days after the Pere Charles went down — conditions have not been clement enough to permit a full recovery operation.

The closest either of the teams came was on Sunday when navy divers went into the water at the location believed to hold the sunken trawler, but couldn’t get any farther down than 15 metres — less than halfway to the level required.

That was Sunday, when the weather in the village was sunny, the water in the sheltered harbour looked calm, and conditions remained bright throughout the morning.

Yesterday brought much rougher scenes, skies the colour of steel, swollen waves not just further out to sea near Hook Head, but also much closer to the harbour, which meant the search operations being carried out for the Pere Charles and the Honeydew II were again confined to the shoreline, the air and to trawlers which are still volunteering their services.

Wreckage continues to be washed up from the Honeydew, including, poignantly, a section of the name plate from the side of the vessel, but all that’s been recovered from the Pere Charles remains the two liferafts, a lifebelt and a gas bottle.

The volunteers from coastguard stations throughout the south continue to offer their services, while support remains constant from all parts of the country — the Dunmore East coastguard co-ordinator Jim Griffin received a phone call yesterday morning from a former RNLI volunteer in Galway who was willing to come down for a few days to help with the search.

It’s known that the families of the deceased are hugely appreciative of all of the voluntary effort, as well as the work put in by those in the gardaí, the navy and the coastguard officials.

As the rain continued to wash down on the south-east coast yesterday afternoon and the breeze continued to chill the seaside village of Dunmore East, the one beacon of light for the community was the weather forecast, and a possible calming of the sea and the wind in sufficient quantity to allow a safe recovery dive to proceed from the Granuaile this morning.

These people want the volunteers to be able to go home, want the search completed, want the unwelcome bustle of the last six days gone from their lives, want the waiting to be over, want their questions answered.

Most of all, they want to bury their dead.