Tributes were paid on Wednesday to a mother and daughter who perished following a road traffic collision near their home in North Cork on Tuesday morning.
Geraldine Clancy (58) and her daughter Louise (22) died after their car was involved in a collision with another car on the Fermoy-Ballyduff Road at about 11.30am on Tuesday.
Ms Clancy’s Ford Focus was pushed through a gap in a stone wall and rolled over onto its roof into 4ft of water in a flooded field adjacent to the River Blackwater.
Paramedics worked to save both women after they were retrieved from the upturned car by the emergency services but they were both pronounced dead at the scene.
Postmortem examinations on both women were carried out by Assistant State Pathologist Dr Margaret Bolster at Cork University Hospital, but gardaí have not released the results.
Being comforted
Ms Clancy and her daughter are survived by her husband Noel and other adult children, Declan and Fiona, who are being comforted by relatives at their home in Kilworth.
On Wednesday, local Kilworth Parish Priest Fr Donal Leahy, who performed the last rites on both women at the scene of the incident, spoke of the devastation their deaths have caused.
Fr Leahy said people were calling to the Clancy home at Leitrim in Kilworth to comfort the family, but were lost for words to express their sadness.
“We’re in deep shock, and for us here in Kilworth this Christmas, there won’t be the same joy that we normally have because there will be a sombre mood everywhere,” he said.
Louise was a third year arts student at University College Cork but was on an Erasmus exchange programme for a year at the University of Sussex in Falmer near Brighton.
Recently returned
She was studying English literature and Sociology at the university and living in Brighton, but had only at the weekend returned home to Kilworth for the Christmas holidays.
On Wednesday, UCC issued a statement expressing its sympathy to the Clancy family on the loss of Louise and her mother and the university flag flew at half mast as a mark of respect.
Ms Clancy and her daughter will lie in repose at Ronayne’s Funeral Home on Lower Patrick Street in Fermoy on Christmas Eve (Thursday) from 7pm, with Rosary at 9pm.
They will be buried on St Stephen’s Day at St Michael’s Cemetery in Ballyduff in Co Waterford following requiem Mass at noon at St Martin’s Church in Kilworth.
