‘IT WAS SHEER PANIC’
Four Wexford people caught up in London terror scare
FOUR Wexford people were among terrified shoppers caught up in the recent terror scare in London.
‘I can’t explain the terror. It was sheer panic,’ said Catherine (Biddy) Walsh, who was in London for the weekend with her sister Maria Brennan, visiting her niece Orlaith Brennan and boyfriend Seán Kennedy.
The group were walking towards Oxford Street underground station when they encountered thousands of frightened people stampeding in their direction. They took shelter in a nearby café, where they spent a terror-stricken hour and a half waiting in a locked basement until police gave the all-clear to leave.
‘IT WAS sheer panic. You can’t imagine how scary it was to witness thousands of frightened people running towards you,’ said well-known Wexford woman Catherine (Biddy) Walsh who was caught up in the stampede that was sparked by a suspected terrorist attack in London’s Oxford Street on Black Friday, one of the busiest shopping days of the year.
Nine people were trampled and injured at Oxford Circus tube station where Catherine and her sister Maria Brennan, her niece Orlaith Brennan and boyfriend Sean Kennedy from Wexford were headed when there was an outbreak of mass panic which police later said appeared to have been triggered by a fight between two men in the tube station.
The altercation caused people to run and in the confusion many travellers believed they heard gunshots. The incident sparked a major anti-terrorist response involving large teams of armed police and helicopters.
Catherine and Maria were visiting Orlaith and her boyfriend Sean in St. Alban’s, London where Orlaith works in a school of music, and the three women went shopping in Oxford Street in the afternoon on Friday while engineer Sean was working on a construction contract in the vicinity.
The trio stopped in a cafe in Vere Street, a stone’s throw from Oxford Street, to wait for Sean to finish work and when he arrived, the group made their way to the nearest underground station.
‘Suddenly, there was a crowd stampeding towards us. There were thousands of people. Everyone was shouting and screaming. Someone said something about a gunman. Our immediate reaction was to turn on our heels and start running in the same direction as everyone else. We didn’t know if we were running towards the danger. Thank God Sean was with us as he knows the area. Otherwise I don’t know what we would have done’, said Catherine, a SIPTU employee and well-known actress and comedian.
Christmas window displays in large stores such as Selfridge’s and Debenhams were trampled by shoppers in the rush to escape from the area.
‘The first thing that comes into your head is that there’s a terrorist attack. We all had different thoughts. I thought there was someone behind us with a machine gun or something. We ran into the cafe where we had been. Orlaith pulled people off the street and into the cafe and asked the staff to lock the doors.’
‘Sean had contacted us and asked us to wait for him, otherwise we would have been in the Oxford Street tube station where all the people were injured’, said Catherine who spent an hour and a half in the basement of the cafe with about 100 other people after cafe staff locked the premises down and turned off the lights.
‘We just waited there. It was pure panic. There were children and babies. There were even grown men crying. Fear has different effects on people. Orlaith felt very angry. It was strange but all that day I had been thinking, what if something happened, what would we do.’
‘We couldn’t get internet in the basement. We didn’t know what was happening. Maria rang home to Wexford to find out what was going on. They were watching it on Sky news.’
‘Eventually, someone came and said they had contacted the police and we were allowed to leave provided we followed instructions on the streets. you couldn’t go near Oxford Street, it was cordoned off. We walked in silence for about 20 minutes to a different tube station. A lot of other people weren’t talking either. It was like a war zone.
‘There were helicopters flying overhead. Sean Kennedy is a runner and I swear if he had broken into a run I’d have kept up with him’, said Catherine.
‘No-one spoke on the street. Everyone was just walking to the tube station.’
‘When we got back to St. Alban’s, my first reaction was Thank God we’re safe’, said Catherine who arrived back in Wexford with her sister on Monday evening. ‘We’re trying to put it behind us now,’ she added.
Catherine said she didn’t believe that the terrorist alert was sparked by two men fighting on an tube station platform. ‘It was more than that. Within minutes there were armed police everywhere and helicopters flying all over the place.’