A farmer who rushed to help two women after their car ended up in a badly-flooded field following a two-car collision in north Cork yesterday, discovered that the victims were his own wife and daughter.
The crash occurred on the Fermoy to Ballyduff road at about 11.30am when the car Geraldine Clancy (58) and her daughter Louise were travelling in collided with a car driven by a friend of Louise’s emerging from a side road.
Eye-witnesses told gardaí that they believed Mrs Clancy’s Ford Focus was hit broadside on the driver’s side and the car was pushed through a gap in a stone wall before falling into a flooded field.
Husband
After being alerted to the emergency, her husband, Noel Clancy from the townland of Leitrim, near Kilworth, rushed to the scene in a bid to use his tractor to pull the car from the water, only to discover the identities of the victims when he arrived.
“The poor man came down thinking he was helping the emergency services rescue a couple of strangers only to discover that it was his own wife and daughter who had died – it’s just so sad it’s almost incredible,” said one local.
Motorists struggled to get the two women out of the car which had ended up on its roof in about 4ft of water. They were soon joined by units of the Cork County Fire Service from Fermoy and Mitchelstown.
Gardaí from Fermoy also attended the scene as did HSE paramedics from Cork city who worked on the two casualties after they were recovered from the upturned car.
However, Mrs Clancy and her daughter, who had been on their way to finish last-minute Christmas shopping in Fermoy just minutes earlier, were both pronounced dead at the scene.
‘Flooded heavily’
“It was such a freakish tragedy – there’s only one gap in the stone wall and the gap was barely big enough for the car to go through and normally that dyke would be dry but with all the rain, it had flooded heavily – they were just so desperately unlucky,” said an individual familiar with the area.
The driver of the other car, also from Kilworth, was not seriously injured, but she was deeply traumatised and was treated for shock by paramedics. A forensic examination was completed before the road was reopened after 5pm.
The bodies of Mrs Clancy and her daughter Louise – a former student at University College Cork who was the youngest of the Clancy’s three children – were removed to Cork University Hospital.
Postmortems will be carried out today by Assistant State Pathologist, Dr Margaret Bolster to establish the exact cause of death.
