VIDEO: ‘At a fatal road accident all you will hear are screams and sirens’ Munster students told

A dramatic presentation on road safety designed to “shake up” young people clearly worked yesterday.

Crash survivor Gillian Treacy, with her son Sean. She lost her four-year-old son Ciaran when her car was struck by a drink driver.

Up to 800 transition year students from secondary schools in Limerick and North Cork gathered in a stunned silence as they came face to face with the horror of death on Irish roads.

After two hours when some were visibly upset, RobynO’Riordan, a 15-year-old student at The Salesian Secondary School in Limerick summed it up: “It was scary.”

Following a dramatic enactment of a fatal drink-driving scene, the students listened intently to Gillian Treacy as she repeated her victim impact statement which made national headlines recently as a man was jailed for a drink-driving episode which led to the death of her son, Ciaran, aged 4.

Gillian said: “I am just here today to make the students aware of what can happen when a person drives when under the influence of drink.”

Crash survivor Gillian Treacy, with her son Sean. She lost her four-year-old son Ciaran when her car was struck by a drink driver.

Finbarr O’Rourke was jailed for seven and a half years last week.

Gillian said: “I came here to read out the victim impact statement I read out in court. He had consumed nine pints of cider, crossed over the white line and it was a head on. He was sentenced last week.

“For me no sentence for what he did could be long enough. I hope no young person here today in their life time has to go through what we have gone though.

“When Ciaran became silent after the impact, it was a silence I had never experienced before.”

Although Gillian herself received multiple injuries, the worst pain, she said, is the constant ache in her heart at the loss of Ciaran.

Garda Tony Miniter of the Limerick traffic corps and the organiser of the Lifesaver Project, which is backed by Limerick City and County Council and the emergency services, said the aim is to bring home to young people the reality of road traffic accidents.

He said: “They are horrendous, disgusting and heartbreaking. And our message to the students here today is that they don’t have to go through it. What they see here in our dramatic re-enactment of a drink-driving road accident and what they hear from victims goes close to the bone.

“These students need to see what it really is like before it is too late.”

School students watching the enactment of a road accident at the event at the South Court Hotel, Limerick, yesterday.

The Lifesaver Project has been operating in Limerick since 2006 and since then has directly addressed more than 32,000 people on the matter of road safety and the carnage associated with it.

It is primarily aimed at transition, fifth, and sixth-year students.

“Over two days this week we had more than 1,600 students. It shakes up a lot of kids about what can happen on the roads. They are young drivers facing more than 50 years on the road and they are a key target audience for An Garda Siochana and the other emergency services, to get across a good positive attitude to road safety for their future careers in driving,” said Garda Miniter.

PJ Cummins, an advanced paramedic with the ambulance service said the hardest thing in training young colleagues was how to break the bad news to families.

“At the scene of a fatal road accident, there are no bells or whistles, all you hear are screams and sirens,” he said.