COWEN NEEDS TO LEARN A LESSON
Minister is invited to graves of mum & daughter killed by driver who didn’t have a full licence
BARRY Cowen has been invited to visit the graves of a mother and daughter killed in a car crash involving an unaccompanied learner driver.
The Agriculture Minister continues to be slammed by safety campaigners who demand to know how many learner permits he had before he passed his driving test.
Noel Clancy lost his wife Geraldine, 58 and 22-year-old daughter Louise in 2015 and said the trauma and heartbreak “never goes away.”
The road safety campaigner added while Mr Cowen addressed his drinkdriving ban as a “stupid, stupid mistake,” he believes the Fianna Fail TD hasn’t recognised the serious issue of continuous unaccompanied learner driving.
Mr Clancy, from Cork, told RTE’S Radio One: “Barry Cowen has dealt with and explained away the issue of drinkdriving, but I don’t think he has addressed or recognised the fact that continuous unaccompanied learner driving is a serious issue.
“I haven’t spoken to him, but I will invite Barry Cowen to come down here, to the cemetery where my wife and daughter are buried. I will explain to him the serious problem with unaccompanied learner drivers.”
Geraldine and Louise were going to the library before Christmas when they were involved in a crash in Kilworth, Co Cork.
Their car was thrown upside down into a flooded ditch and they died at the scene.
A student who was driving her father’s car was given a suspended sentence.
Tragically, Mr Clancy came upon the scene and did not realise it was his wife and daughter initially.
He thought both were dead but did not recognise his them at that moment.
He recalled: “I turned back and I said, ‘God almighty, it’s the same colour car and it’s the same make, a Ford Focus, dark blue’.
“Something went off in my brain then and the boot had been torn open and the number plate was on the boot.
“I reached over the side of the drain and closed the boot and then I read the number plate of the car and it was then I knew it was Geraldine and Louise.”
Mr Clancy revealed how the next moments were a blur of activity but he could remember fire brigade helmets strewn all over the road as the crews tried to save the women.
He said: “I knew Louise was dead, I had great hope for Geraldine. They got up off her, I thought she was going to
HUMILIATED Barry
Cowen in the Dail make it. When the doctor told me they were dead, I was absolutely stunned.
“I had left my farm that morning to drive on a 10-minute journey. Before I’d reached my home farm, I was planning the funerals of my wife and daughter.”
On Tuesday night Mr Cowen issued a grovelling apology to the Dail after it was revealed he had been caught drink -driving and was put off the road for three months in 2016.
It emerged he was driving on a learner permit after his provisional licence “lapsed.”
Mr Cowen said it was not “uncommon” prior to the recent and proper reforms of the system to be driving on a learner permit at his age but admitted it was “bad
practice”.