I was moving to Australia – now I can barely make it out my front door
Róisín Stakelum was on her way to a new life Down Under when a juvenile driver crashed into her, causing shocking injuries and killing his young passenger. Now she wants to use her situation to encourage others to be more mindful on our roads
RÓISÍN Stakelum remembers very little about the car crash that night. ‘I think I might have lost consciousness but I’m not sure,’ she says. ‘I can remember the car coming towards me but only at the very last second. I didn’t see them before that, it happened on a very bendy stretch of the motorway at Mitchelstown.
‘If I’d seen them, I might have moved, but on the other hand, I didn’t have time to be afraid. It was the blink of an eye, a flash. I hit my head pretty severely [off the steering wheel] and had a very serious concussion.
‘I remember being extremely confused and not knowing where I was or what had happened. I just had this sense of terror. My lip was almost detached on one side, so my biggest memory is sitting in the car looking in the mirror and trying to put my lip back on, but it kept falling off.
‘I couldn’t process why that was happening and then there was a garda at the window.’
Recalling the life-changing events of the early hours of July 1 last year, she says, is always ‘fairly intense’, but she’s quick to praise the emergency services and doctors who ‘did a fantastic job putting me back together’.
Indeed, she mentions several times how incredibly lucky she feels to have been pulled out alive from the wreckage of her beloved Kia Riva car. The front seat passenger of the car that crashed straight into her, 16-year-old Johnny Foley, wasn’t so fortunate.
‘I found out pretty quickly that someone had passed away in the other car and I found that really, really hard to take,’ she says quietly. ‘On some level it’s the fact that I was so close to dying myself and that boy had a very similar experience to me, only he didn’t make it.
‘I think about it often, the heartbreak his family and friends had to experience. It’s been a major part of the whole thing for me, that he didn’t come out of the car. He was only 16, such a waste of a young life.’
It’s a magnanimous response to an incident that has changed her own life irrevocably.
Róisín was on her way to Dublin Airport to meet a friend for their ‘farewell holiday’, when a car driving at speeds of over 170kmph in the wrong direction ploughed head-on into her.
A short time earlier, the 37-yearold mental health occupational therapist had left her parents’ home in Fermoy, where it had been an emotional and tearful goodbye. After the holiday, Róisín was due to travel to Australia to join her younger sister Meadhbh.
After years of struggling to pay exorbitant rent and feeling priced out of the housing market, she’d made the difficult decision to emigrate and had secured a job in Melbourne. It was to be an exciting new start, albeit tinged with sadness at leaving the rest of her family behind.
‘I loved my job in Ireland but was finding living here really difficult and I realised Australia would have better opportunities,’ she explains. ‘I also really wanted to be with my sister, we’re very close. She’s been out there since 2020, she’s a social worker. I know my parents hate having her so far away and they were dreading my move, but they also understood. It was very bittersweet, but I was definitely excited.’
After stopping at a service station outside Fermoy to get a coffee in McDonald’s, Róisín resumed her late-night journey. She was due to meet her friend Niamh at the airport in Dublin at 3.30am for their 6am flight to Majorca.
But at 12.45am, just after she rejoined the M8, a stolen car being driven by a teenage boy came hurtling towards her.
At the court case last month, gardaí told how the juvenile driver and four other teenagers stole a Toyota in Cork city two days before the crash. On the night of June 30, they were disturbed trying to steal another car in Glanworth Village. After the gardaí were alerted, they were then pursued for about half an hour through back roads in the area.
They eventually drove on to the M8 motorway and headed south on the northbound lane for over 6km at speeds of over 170kmph before crashing into Róisín’s car.
The driver, who can’t be named because he’s a minor, pleaded guilty to dangerous driving, causing the death of his front seat passenger, Johnny Foley. On February 12, he received a four-year detention sentence.
During the court hearing, Róisín gave a powerful victim impact statement, detailing just some of the injuries she’d received. ‘I underwent an eight-hour emergency surgery,’ she said. ‘They put several titanium plates into my face to fix the fractures... Even now I am unable to fully open my mouth... I have nerve damage all over the bottom half of my face and have no sensation or altered sensation in a lot of it. I don’t think I fully understood the meaning of pain until this experience.
‘The first time seeing my face in a mirror after the surgery, my face was so damaged and swollen and bruised I didn’t recognise my own reflection. I thought I was somebody else. That was terrifying. I couldn’t physically smile for months.’
She doesn’t want to discuss the full range of damage that was done to her body, possibly mindful of her parents, Margaret and Gearóid, and the ongoing trauma they’ve experienced since being woken in the middle of the night to be told their daughter hadn’t made it to the airport.
But as well as the injuries to her face, she suffered multiple fractures and serious internal damage. ‘I wasn’t able to walk for ages and was in a wheelchair for two months,’ she says. ‘I was on
‘I couldn’t physically smile for months’
crutches for a long time, even now I have problems with my foot, it will probably never be the same. But at least I have the foot, I do try and see the positives.’
Her fortitude is inspiring, possibly helped by her professional background. ‘Working in mental health, it probably should help and I understand all the things I need to do,’ she explains. ‘But being on the other side, I can now see how hard it is for people to do the stuff I would have told them to do when I was working. It’s given me a new perspective.’
Finding the motivation ‘to get out of bed sometimes can be really difficult’, she says. But she’s seeing a counsellor once a week, who’s ‘very helpful’.
She’s agreed to be interviewed about her ordeal because of the high rate of serious road incidents in this country. Johnny Foley was one of 184 people killed last year. The circumstances of that crash, which left Róisín and two of the other teenagers seriously injured, are particularly troubling.
But in the last two years, Ireland has been experiencing a period of unacceptably high mortality rates on our roads. Last month alone, 19 people lost their lives — that’s six more than in February last year. More than half the victims were in their 20s or younger.
Harrowing cases include 10-yearold Dylan Coady Coleman, who died last Wednesday, the day after his mum Laura gave birth to his new baby brother.
‘I think about prevention a lot,’ says Róisín. ‘If I can use my voice to help, I will do that. There has to be a solution, more than one, and they all need to be explored.’
The fallout of every single road death is immense; families left shattered, communities devastated. Then there are those who survive but suffer life-changing injuries, coupled with mental trauma. As Róisín points out, it’s not just her who lives with the memories of that night. Her friend Niamh Hanley was waiting in the car park of Dublin Airport, growing increasingly worried.
‘My phone was badly damaged in the crash but it was still ringing,’ says Róisín. ‘I got it back a couple of months ago, the guys got it fixed for me, and when I opened up the screen I started bawling crying. I could see all the missed calls from Niamh and the messages, it brought it back again how bad those couple of hours were for her. She went into the airport asking people if they’d seen me, asking if I’d checked in, it must have been terrifying.’
Niamh then started ringing Garda stations and toll booths to check if they’d heard anything or spotted Róisín.
‘She didn’t have a number for my parents, so had to ring my sister in Australia,’ says Róisín. ‘It was my sister who rang my parents. They didn’t answer because their phone was on silent, so she got my older brother, who also lives in Fermoy, to go into them. He had to tell them that I hadn’t made it to the airport.’
In an example of how ‘scrambled’ her brain was after the crash, when gardaí asked for her parents’ phone number she gave them a landline that hadn’t worked for
‘My second time in hospital, the pain was so bad I wanted to die’
ten years. About four hours after the crash, they learned she was in Cork University Hospital.
‘I was worried because I knew my face looked really bad and they’d be afraid,’ says Róisín. ‘So I asked the nurse to warn them. But when they saw I was conscious and speaking I think it was a little bit of a relief.’
After three weeks in hospital, she returned to her parents’ home in Fermoy. However, internal complications set in a couple of months later and she had to be rushed back to CUH.
‘You’d think the pain directly after the crash would have been the worst, but I wanted to die that second time in hospital,’ she says. ‘I didn’t think the body was capable of causing that much pain and it lasted for about 18 hours. Then it just resolved itself.
‘I have pain now, but nothing on that level.’
She admits to finding the recent court case ‘extremely difficult’, but got through it thanks to the support of her garda liaison officer. How did she feel facing the now 17-year-old driver of the other car? ‘It’s hard to describe that,’ she eventually says. ‘I just think the entire situation is very sad.’
As for the four-year detention sentence, she says simply: ‘I respect the function of the court and the judge’s decision.’
A couple of weeks ago she moved out of her parents’ home into her own accommodation nearer Cork city.
‘I’m finding it OK,’ she says. ‘Friends come and stay with me a lot. There’s been an awful lot of anxiety, but it seems to be getting better.’
She is determined to do everything she can to improve her situation, both physically and mentally. Numerous support services, she says, were recommended by the hospital.
‘But obviously there is a financial element to all these things, it’s a bit of a worry,’ she explains. ‘It’s a big expense but I know it’s important, so I need to do it.
‘But there is a sense that it’s a little bit unfair.
‘Originally my savings were for a deposit for a house, then it was money for moving to Australia and now they’re funding my recovery.’
She’s not sure if there will ever be any financial retribution for what she’s had to pay out.
‘But I’m in a privileged position that I have these funds I can use,’ she says. ‘Because if I didn’t, what would I do?’
Her life and all the plans she had have now utterly changed.
‘I can’t see myself going to the other side of the world,’ she says. ‘There are days I can barely make it outside my front door.
‘But the crash was only eight months ago, there’s a long way to go. I used to love going to the gym, I think I went nearly every single day, and I adored running.
‘Driving was an imperative part of my life, I got my licence when I was 17. I sit in a car sometimes now and turn the engine on, but that’s as much as I can do for the moment.’
Her appearance has also changed.
‘I used to love smiling, it’s totally different now,’ she says. ‘But a lot of things are still really uncertain, it might just take time, there’s a lot of dental work still to do, lots of physio.’
She believes feeling rage at her situation would be a ‘wasted emotion’.
‘But I do get angry when I see people driving erratically,’ she says. ‘I don’t feel anger towards the people in the other car, and I think that’s good because I think if I did, I’d find that overwhelming.’
Instead, she wants to plead with drivers to be ‘less aggressive and more mindful’.
‘I do think people can make different decisions,’ she says. ‘There are drivers out there not paying attention, people are careless on the roads, and they need to know the kind of damage it can cause.’