MOTHER ‘GOT A FEELING THAT SOMETHING WASN’T RIGHT’

‘He said they were all gone’

THE woman who lost her mother, partner, sister and two little boys in the Buncrana drowning tragedy has told how she ‘got a feeling something wasn’t right’ the moment she got a phone call after landing off a flight.

In a statement read at yesterday’s inquest, Louise James told the hearing that she last saw her family on Friday, March 18, 2016.

Her partner Seán McGrotty and the boys had dropped her to a friend’s house at 4pm before she travelled to Liverpool for a hen party.

She revealed that just minutes before the tragedy, at 6.55pm, she had spoken by phone with her sister Jodi Lee and the boys, Mark and Evan, who were playing in a park on the shorefront in Buncrana, Co. Donegal.

She told the hearing that a short time later while at the airport ahead of her journey home, ‘I got a feeling something wasn’t right – I don’t know why.

Ms James said she had tried to contact both her partner and her sister but could not reach them.

She managed to get through to one of her brothers to ask ‘had Mammy come home’. He told her there had been an incident in Buncrana and that a car had gone into the water, but that he thought it contained two men.

She took her plane to Belfast and when she arrived she was contacted by family members by phone. ‘It was [her brother] Joshua, he said Seán’s body was the first to be identified... that they were all gone,’ she said.

She was told baby Rionaghac-Ann had been saved.

Ms James travelled to her home in Derry and then on to Letterkenny University Hospital to see her surviving child and to identify the rest of her tragic family. Accompanied by a garda, she first identified her partner Seán McGrotty, then ‘my mammy, Ruth’.

The inquest continues.