‘I THINK I CRIED THE WHOLE WAY UP THE ROAD’
When an explosion devastated the community of Creeslough, the ordinary people who were first on the scene did everything they could to help. Now a new documentary tells their story
IT is an ordinary stretch of road on the N56 in Donegal, just 12 kilometres from the popular seaside resort of Dunfanaghy. The road is a gateway to the Gaeltacht of the north west, used by tourists to get to the stunning views of Sheephaven Bay, Errigle mountain and the wild Altantic shores beyond. But last October, what happened on this ordinary stretch of road changed the lives of the people of Creeslough forever.
On October 7, an ordinary Friday afternoon, when people were looking forward to the weekend, making plans for birthdays, sporting events and more, an
explosion ripped through Lafferty’s Supermarket at the heart of the small village. Ten people were killed and eight others were injured in the blast which also ripped the heart out of this small Donegal community.
Those who died were five-year-old Shauna Flanagan Garwe and her father Robert Garwe, who had gone to the shop to buy a birthday cake for Shauna’s mother.
Catherine O’Donnell, 39, and her son James Monaghan, 13, were in the store queuing up for the post office counter. Leona Harper, 14, had gone to the shop to get an ice cream. Jessica Gallagher, 24; James O’Flaherty, 48; Martin McGill, 49; Martina Martin, 49; and Hugh Kelly, 59 were also in the store, doing everyday things when their lives were so tragically cut short.
Documentary maker Kevin Magee knows the stretch of road really well as it’s one that he’s travelled countless times. It’s why he wanted to make a programme about those in the village and what they did in the aftermath of such a terrible event.
The programme An Craoslach, part of a new series for TG4 by Magee called Iniúchaidh TG4, will be broadcast on the station this Wednesday at 9.30pm and allows the people of Creeslough to tell their own story.
‘I have been going up there for 40 years,’ he says. ‘I know that stretch of the road extremely well and I knew the garage in Creeslough, I had been in it countless times. I did feel a very strong attachment to the place and I felt great sensitivity towards the people as well because I know that community. Everyone who goes to Donegal knows that stretch of the road that passes through Creeslough.’
Magee, an award-winning documentary maker who previously worked for BBC NI’s spotlight, wanted to highlight those people who got to the scene first, the unsung heroes who, in the face of great adversity, did everything they could to try and find people in the wreckage that lay in front of them. They too, were ordinary people just going about their day when the blast happened.
Lorcan Roarty lives opposite Lafferty’s where he runs Wild Atlantic Campsite for tourists and holidaymakers who often popped over to the shop, as did Lorcan though he admits he always gave himself plenty of time.
‘It was a difficult place to get in and out of, in that you would go in and there would always be locals there,’ he says of the community, camaraderie and chat that Lafferty’s was known for.
‘The folks working in the shop, you would end up getting caught talking to them and what not, so you would need to give yourself five minutes spare at any stage for heading in there.’
Lorcan was at home when the blast shook the very ground he was standing on but immediately left the safety of his home without thinking about himself and ran to help. He managed to help three people to get out.
‘I thought it was, potentially a nuclear bomb or something like that,’ he says of the moment of the explosion. ‘The whole place shook and we looked outside then, and the dust was coming down. There was an awful lot of work going on in front of the forecourt —you could see the devastation there. I ran out to the back of the building and, I suppose we started - we kicked into gear out the back of the building in terms of trying to help some survivors.
‘There would have been three people that I would have been involved with and helped in bringing them out, along with others so it wasn’t single-handed or anything like that. I was just delighted we were able to help in that way and thankfully the three that came out are doing well.’
Colin Kilpatrick is a lorry driver from down the road in Raphoe. He was making a delivery at the Homeland Agri store in Creeslough on the other side of the road to the Applegreen store when it exploded and immediately ran across to try and help, being one of the first at the scene in the aftermath.
“There was a lot of dust, there was nobody kind of walking about but there was one girl there, a young girl,’ he recalls on the documentary.
‘She was in front of the post office — she was distressed and she was shouting at her sister inside. I just took her across the road and then got her away, and her two sisters made it out of the shop.’
Local people were coming to the scene in their droves to try and do whatever they could to help.
‘You have everybody,’ Colin says of the people who were searching through the rubble with their hands. ‘You have a man in shorts, you have a man in work clothes, you have people in high vis, you know, you have me then dressed like a lorry driver.’
Together they worked tirelessly to try and move rubble in the hope of finding people still alive.
‘Anything that needed lifted we eventually got,’ Colin says. ‘We had to get a jack out of a car to get some things lifted and that worked and we got the bits off. The local people did a lot, the first hours as I say, it was unreal the amount of stuff that was moved.’
Those who couldn’t shift rubble tried to help in other ways.
Áine Nic Eachmharcaigh and her three children in their late teens and early twenties live close by and initially she thought her sons had been hurt in the blast.
‘I got a phone call saying that there was an explosion down at
‘She was distressed and shouting at her sister inside’
the shop,’ she says. ‘And that my two sons were down there but that they weren’t hurt. At that time, I thought that they were in the explosion, but I found out after that they weren’t. They were close to the shop and they were also told that there was an explosion so they went in to help.’
Áine and her daughter ran down to the garage but they were met by a scene of total devastation.
‘I saw things scattered across the road — bricks, windows,’ she says. ‘And because my daughter was with me, I didn’t want her going near it either. So, I said to her, “Right, we need to turn the traffic around because the fire brigade, the services and the gardaí will be trying to get through.”’
She and her daughter directed the emergency services to the site and held other motorists back but her boys were in the building .
‘My two sons were helping people that were hurt, lifting bricks and taking stuff out of the apartments,’ she says. ‘My youngest son said he could go further into the shop to see if anyone else was in there. And there was one girl, he put his coat on her because she was cold.’
These small kindnesses were all the people of Creeslough could do.
‘You don’t think about the danger, or that another explosion could happen,’ says Aine. ‘You just go in and do whatever you can do at the time.’
Kevin Magee spent two weeks in Creeslough, talking to many people who knew that they were lucky their own families had escaped unscathed.
Like John Friel, who lives close by and thought his son-in-law was in the blast.
‘I just knew that something terrible had happened,’ he says. ‘I heard this awful noise and I thought that maybe one of my grandsons had jumped out of the bed and went through the ceiling — it was as bad as that. So I jumped up and I went up the stairs and they were just watching the television. And there was no damage done upstairs. I went out and around the house to check on the roof, if anything was wrong there. I didn’t see anything.’
Minutes later, when he found out about the explosion, he was worried.
‘There was a chance that my son-in-law was in the shop,’ he says. ‘We didn’t know where he was so we had to call him because he was thinking about going in to buy a Friday treat for the boys. But, he didn’t go, he needed petrol too, we were just lucky that he wasn’t there.’
Banding together was the one thing that this community, helpless in their loss, could do to feel useful and it was something that Kevin Magee could hear in the radio reports he was listening to from his home in Belfast.
‘Everyone was talking about how courageous the local people were, how the local community had worked together to try and assist the injured. People talked about how these were men in shorts, women in flipflops, totally ill-equipped for this terrible scenario but they came together and worked as best they could.’
Those people included trained search and rescue volunteer Michael McCamley who drove to Creeslough from Newry, Co Down with his dog Bodhi whose job it was to search the area of the collapsed building for signs of life.
And 47-year-old Henry Gallagher from from Treantagh, near Letterkenny, County Donegal, a digger driver who volunteered to help, lifting piles of rubble so that the emergency services could recover the bodies of those who died.
As he worked solidly for 24 hours, he could see people gathered behind him and says that he knew that in among the helpers and the hi-vis vests, there were anxious family members, waiting for news of their loved ones.
Henry wanted to help, he would have stayed for as long as it took, he says, just to get every one of those who had died back to their families and a place of safety, knowing, he says: ‘The only way that they are going to get the news of a loved one being taken out, is for me to get in,’
He was there removing rubble from the collapsed building until the last body of ten, that of 14-year-old Leona Harper, was recovered. The teenager’s mother Donna Harper singled Mr Gallagher out for praise at her daughter’s funeral.
Her loss and the loss that others in the community suffered was felt keenly by the rescuers too and in the days and months that followed. Henry didn’t know any of the people who died but he went to every single wake to pay his respects.
But it was as he left the scene of the explosion and drove back home, the enormity of what he had just witnessed engulfed him.
‘I drove back to the house,’ he says. ‘I think I cried the whole way up the road. And cried. I was just in tears coming up the road. I came to the back door of the house and the wife came out and she saw me and I looked at her and the next thing she broke down and I broke down.’
Earlier this week, a star-studded concert was held to honour those who died in Creeslough and to comfort those who are grieving the loss of family members, friends and relatives. But it was hoped that the concert would also give the community a boost, to offer consolation and hope so that they can look to moving forward together.
But is it possible after such a shattering loss for a community to move forward?
For Kevin Magee, the answer lies with the community itself.
‘People have different views and they answered these questions in different ways on the documentary,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to give my opinion on that as I have let the people we spoke to answer that question themselves in the programme. I wanted to give the people in the community a voice to let them tell their own stories themselves and they have done it very eloquently. And they did their very best in very difficult circumstances.’
■ An Craoslach, the first in the Iniúchadh TG4 series, will be broadcast on TG4 this Wednesday February 8 at 9.30pm and on the TG4 player.
‘I was just in tears coming up the road’