'Step into our shoes': Hundreds gather in shared grief to remember road traffic victims
RTÉ broadcaster Joe Duffy speaking at the packed Road Traffic Victims Day of Remembrance ceremony — surrounded by portraits of lost loved ones. Picture: Bob Morrison
A deafening screech rang out as hundreds of chairs scraped the wooden floor when, as one, hundreds of families took to their feet for a shared minute’s silence.
It was a rare reminder of just how many families from across the country share the grief of a loved one lost to our dangerous roads.
Some 168 people have been killed on Irish roads so far this year, 35 more than the same period in 2022 and 49 more than in 2019.
The number of fatalities so far in 2023, with more than a month to go, has already surpassed the total number of deaths throughout 2022, which was 155.
Families shared their stories of unimaginable grief in Mullingar's Bloomfield Hotel yesterday as candles were lit in memory of the ones they have lost.
The room heard of a child killed while walking to school, siblings lost to drunk drivers, and spouses never returning home from work.
Those in attendance shared one thing in common in that they have been “forever changed” as a result of the shocking and preventable loss of their loved ones.
Some 408 photos of road traffic victims were on display, a number that rises each year. Along with their common grief, the frustration in the room was palpable as those in attendance yearned intensely for change on Irish roads.
Irish Road Victim Association (IRVA) founder Donna Price said the day of remembrance provides comfort to families who can see that they’re not alone in their grief with new influxes of family members each year.
“There’s a weird comfort in knowing you’re not on your own,” she said before adding: “life goes on for everybody else but for us, it really stops.”
She said each person in attendance has had to rebuild their lives surrounding shock and unimaginable tragedy and what makes things so much more difficult to bear for those impacted is how preventable their loved one’s death was.
“It's not an incurable illness that has taken our children or our loved ones. It's something so trivial like somebody deciding to be selfish and not driving safely,” she said.
Ms Price said seeing the increase in photos each year never gets easy, especially given that a photo of her son, Darren, is among them.
The 18-year-old engineering student was driving to college when he was killed in a collision with a HGV driver in 2006.
“He was just in a musical before he died, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, and that’s all I have of his voice, I have that recording of him singing in that and it was a wonderful show,” she said.
Ms Price went to see her son perform three times, althoug he did not tell his family that he was doing the musical.
“He was supposed to be studying for his Leaving Cert and he was doing rehearsals for this musical,” she recalled, laughing. Some 17 years on, Ms Price said it never gets easier.
“The pain is always there, you just learn to cope with it a bit better as the years go on but you always have that loss, that hole in your heart and your whole life. There’s always that empty place at the table,” she said.
In the first few years following Darren’s death, Ms Price watched the recording of his performance all the time, however, it’s much harder now to do so.
“I don't want to go back to those really early days but it's lovely to have it. You might break out the old videos from time to time but not as regularly as you would do in your earlier years,” she said.
Ms Price said there is “no turning back the clock” for families who have lost loved ones on Irish roads, who are left with a heart-breaking new normal and with numbers on the up, she sometimes finds herself asking: “Are we doing any good?”
Although this year’s figures are shocking, she said there were 368 road fatalities the year Darren was killed, 2006.
“That figure came down steadily over the years with the advent of the Road Safety Authority in 2006 and the numbers came down for quite a number of years,” she said.
Although this year’s figures are still less than half of those in the year Darren was killed, Ms Price said: “We can’t live with that number.”
“We know that 168 families are destroyed forever, this is the worst year ever for them,” she said.
Among the “long lists” of measures which IRVA believe should be introduced to curb dangerous driving are increased penalty points and far stronger road policing.
“I’ve never been stopped, I’ve never been breathalysed, we don't have that rigorous enforcement.
“There needs to be a likelihood of you encountering a checkpoint before people will stop taking chances and at the moment, they're taking those chances because enforcement is so so low,” she said.
Ms Price also said there must be more urgency particularly when it comes to the Government’s vision to have zero road deaths by 2050. “I’ll be dead then. I would like to see that in my lifetime,” she said.
Julie Patton from Donegal lost her oldest child Shane, who was killed shortly after completing his Leaving Cert 11 years ago.
“It left our whole family devastated; it left a big void in our life. Instead of setting the table for five, you’re setting the table for four,” she said.
Shane, who would have turned 30 last weekend, was driving through a crossing when a man crashed into the side of his car.
The man who crashed into Shane was drunk, speeding at 165km despite a speed limit of 100km/h, and had almost 500 previous criminal convictions. “Shane never stood a chance,” she said.
The man had no driving licence or insurance and fled to Northern Ireland following the crash before being extradited four years later to face trial. He served 12 months of an 18-month sentence after pleading guilty to careless driving.
“You get up every day and you know that you have to keep going and you have to keep his memory alive. You have to keep going for your family,” she said.
Ms Patton planted a laburnum tree in her garden on what would have been Shane’s 19th birthday. The tree carries yellow blooms in the summer months, “because he was always wearing yellow t-shirts.”
Catherine Flaherty’s parents have not had a Christmas tree in their house since their 33-year-old daughter’s death in 2012 as they have been “completely destroyed” by the loss.
The driver who crashed into Ms Flaherty’s sister Delia was drunk and driving on the wrong side of a motorway near Galway.
“My mam still goes down to the graveyard two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening, religiously,” she said.
Ms Flaherty spoke to her sister just ten minutes before the crash which ultimately took her life while her mother was in New York at the time, trying to get home as soon as possible.
Ms Flaherty and her father travelled to the hospital in Tullamore as soon as they heard the news, passing Delia’s car on the way. It was still on the scene “in bits”.
Delia succumbed to her injuries a day after her mother arrived home.
Ms Flaherty said speed vans and other forms of road policing are there to save lives, adding that groups on social media which warn drivers of speed detectors or checkpoints are “hurtful” to those who have lost loved ones.
“Try and step into our shoes for one day, these are not money-making machines, they’re there to prevent road deaths,” she said.
Broadcaster Joe Duffy recalled being informed by RTÉ’s chaplain in 1991 that his 25-year-old brother Aidan had been killed in a collision.
“My first words were: ‘This will kill my mother’,” he said, adding that the drive to his mother’s home in Ballyfermot to inform her was the longest drive of his life.
“I had already phoned my next-door neighbour who told me that Mabel was sitting in her kitchen chair in the garden enjoying the late August sun,” he said. His mother’s life was never the same again.
“Just under 10,000 people have been killed in traffic accidents since,” he said. “Your relative, your loved one is 100% gone, percentages and in many cases statistics are irrelevant,” he told attendees.
He said countless drivers are taking risks and lessons from all road deaths must be learned going forward, while echoing IRVA’s calls for a heavier garda presence on Irish roads.
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