A woman seriously injured in a wrong-way motorway crash in Ireland three years ago said she ‘absolutely cannot believe it’s happened again’.
Róisín Stakelum was driving to the airport on July 1, 2023, for a holiday before a planned emigration to Australia when she was hit head-on by a car full of teenagers going the wrong way.
She said the near-identical horror crash on the M9 last week that left five teenagers dead and three sisters and a young boy in another car seriously hurt has ‘brought it all back’.
‘I just can’t believe it’s happened again,’ she said.
Funerals were held for Joe Carthy, Alex McCarthy and Kamil Pustkowski on Friday while services for Jeremy O’Brien and Jack Kennedy will be held on Monday and Tuesday.
The five boys were travelling in a high-powered BMW that was heading the wrong way down the M9 in Co Kildare and hit another vehicle.
The occupants of the other car, Niamh and Alma Kinsella, aged in their 30s, their younger sister Ella Hendricken, who is in her 20s, and a seven-year-old boy, all remain in hospital.
The four relatives had similarly been on their way to the airport to fly over to the UK for a wedding.
A prayer vigil in solidarity with the injured women and boy was held on Friday evening in Saint Clare’s Church in Graiguecullen, Carlow near the Laois border.
More than £600,000 has been raised for the family members to support them on the ‘long and challenging road ahead’.
Taoiseach Micheál Martin said he was ‘shocked and saddened’ by the crash, which he described as being the result of ‘an irresponsible and dangerous act’.
Mr Martin said such incidents are, in some cases, ‘being done for likes on social media’.
Ms Stakelum said on Saturday: ‘I’m so upset. It’s really, really affected me.
‘I can’t stop thinking about the girls and the little boy in the car that was crashed into, and what they must be going through, and it’s brought it all back for me.
‘I haven’t been able to sleep properly since I heard about this, to be honest, and I just can’t believe it’s happened again, and that I don’t feel like there was anything really done to try to prevent something like this from happening again.’
Recalling her own crash, she said she had ‘no time to react’ to the car coming at her from the wrong way.
‘I was probably drifting in and out of consciousness, but I remember the headlights, I remember the big bang, and I remember being in the car, absolutely terrified afterwards.
‘I had had a fairly significant head injury, so everything – like nothing, made sense. I could not comprehend what had happened.
‘I didn’t know where I was. I had forgotten where I was going. It was just absolutely terrifying.’
Ms Stakelum told RTÉ’s Brendan O’Connor radio programme that a ‘psychological toll’ involving fear in the world kicked in when she was leaving the safety of the hospital.
‘That fear has lived in me since – it hasn’t really gone away. It has improved somewhat, but I am still absolutely terrified of everything.’
Ms Stakelum has since been able to return to work two days per week but said ‘it’s a struggle’, adding: ‘I still have a lot of physical consequences and psychological consequences that affect my ability to work, and it has affected my trajectory in work.’
Asked if she thought she would ever go back to her old life, she said: ‘No, I don’t. I think my life is always going to be different.
‘I’m always going to live with the scars, physical and psychological, from what happened to me that night. I’ll never be the same again.’
She said she is a completely different person following the crash as she urged everyone to be more careful on the roads, ‘especially the small cohort of young people’ that are driving dangerously on motorways, adding: ‘It has to stop – it’s absolutely ridiculous.
‘People that survive crashes like that, they don’t necessarily get their own lives back.’
She said she was ‘angry’ that ‘nothing has been put in place to stop this from happening’ again, adding that other European countries have alert systems for wrong-way drivers on motorways.
Asked how she feels about the driver who crashed into her, Ms Stakelum said: ‘Mixed emotions. I have a lot of empathy for him. I have an awful lot of anger as well.’
She said he did not have an easy life but added it was ‘not an excuse’.
Further asked to reflect on the boys involved on Sunday’s crash, she told the programme: ‘I don’t know, that’s a harder one to answer.
‘I do have empathy for them, and I have a lot of empathy for their families and what they’ve been going through.’
On the family injured in the crash, she added: ‘I don’t know what they have ahead of them and trauma can affect people in so many different ways.
‘I don’t know what kind of injuries they have.
‘All I could say is that it’s going to be … a slow process to get back to normal – and if there’s anything that I can do to help them, I would really like to be able to do that if they were willing to accept my help.’
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