A 19-year-old woman died in a house fire in Ballyfermot early yesterday morning but two young children in the house were saved by the actions of a neighbour who smashed his way into the house with his bare hands.
Another child, a three-year-old boy, was rescued by firefighters who found him hiding under a bed in the smoke-filled house.
Ballyfermot residents living near the house on Oranmore Road came outside when they heard yelling and screaming shortly before midnight on Wednesday.
Peter McGee (26) said he watched as a woman ran out the front door and her hair was on fire and she was screaming.
Another witness, Andrew Smith (23), his mother and a next-door neighbour, Bridget Smith, ran to her aid and smothered the flames with a white housecoat. The badly burned woman was yelling: "Get my kids, get my kids," Mr Smith said.
Derek Kiernan, a HSE porter, was in the garden of his home when he saw the fire and he jumped over three low walls separating him from the house that was on fire and climbed on to a concrete awning at the front of a house. Aware that the children were still in the house, Mr Kiernan looked for something to break the glass. There was nothing to hand, so Mr Kiernan smashed a bedroom window with his bare arm. He suffered a deep gash to his right arm and received several stitches.
Mr Kiernan pulled a badly burned young girl, aged about seven, from the first storey bedroom and passed her down to another neighbour. He jumped off the awning and ran through the front door of the house and into the smoke and fire.
"I found the boy on the stairs," Mr Kiernan said yesterday. He picked up the frightened boy, James, who was about five, and ran outside. The two children were taken inside the house he shares with his partner who helped to comfort the children until emergency workers arrived.
A fire brigade officer found the youngest child, aged about three, under a bed, but they were unable to save another woman, whose body was found near the front door.
Neighbours named the people living in the house as Alan Byrne and his girlfriend Debbie whose small boy Leon was rescued from under the bed. Mr Byrne was not present at the time of the fire. The two older children rescued were named as their niece and nephew, Danielle and James.
Gardaí said last night that they were not yet at liberty to identify the woman who had died in the fire, a visitor who had only arrived that evening.