A friend of a man who drowned in the River Lee in Cork while people filmed the tragedy rather than coming to his aid has called for the introduction of legislation to prosecute people who film and post such tragedies online.
Kelly Ann Peyton was a close friend of Luke Hyde (33), who got into difficulty while swimming in the north channel of the River Lee on April 29th. She said she and Mr Hyde’s family are seeking to have legislation introduced to stop people filming such unfolding tragedies.
Ms Peyton told The Neil Prendeville Show on Cork’s Red FM that she believed “100 per cent” that it should be an offence to film a tragedy like what happened to Mr Hyde and the legislation should be called “Luke’s Law” to save other families from going through what the Hyde family have had to endure.
Mr Hyde had gone to swim across the north channel of the Lee from Pope’s Quay to Lavitt’s Quay with a friend who made it across, and she had since spoke to Mr Hyde’s friend who told her people had lined the quays and filmed the tragedy on their phones rather than help.
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“As far as I know, he [Mr Hyde] reached out for help in the water a few times, his hand went up as if to say, ‘Help’. There was loads of people around the quay wall, and they were all pointing [phones] at him... not one person took a life buoy - and there are four either side - and threw one in,“ she said.
“It should be an offence, because when the guards and the ambulance personnel arrived on the scene, they had to fight, like, practically push people out of the way to get in, to try and lend help to get Luke, to get him out of the water.”
Mr Hyde’s mother, Lily, had spoken last week on The Neil Prendeville Show of her horror and disgust when she arrived on the scene to discover her son had drowned while scores of people had lined Pope’s Quay, Lavitt’s Quay and the linking Shandon Footbridge to watch and film the tragedy.
“Luke … was my baby son. I was disgusted when I heard you talking this morning about those people down there. It was like a circus, watching my son drown, instead of trying to help him,” said Ms Hyde, who had lost another son, Brian, in 2019.
“What have people in this world come to? Morons, I don’t think there’s even a word to describe them. It will never leave me, and the clips I saw on the news... I don’t know how I’ll ever, ever forget it. I never will, it will live with me forever more.”
Ms Peyton said she and the Hyde family would lobby local Cork North Central TDs such as Thomas Gould and Ken O’Flynn to table legislation on the floor of the Dáil to make it an offence to film and post footage of such tragedies online.
Ms Peyton said she had trawled the internet over the weekend for footage of the tragedy, and while such material appeared to have been taken down from major social platforms, she appealed to anyone who may have received film footage on their phones to delete it out of respect for the Hyde family.
