Camross woman caught up in Barcelona attack horror
Camross woman Nóirín Doyle had just left Las Ramblas and was strolling through the nearby Gothic quarter of Barcelona when the terrorist attack took place, sending thousands of frightened people racing through the streets in panic, away from the scene of the carnage.
‘It was absolute mayhem with people screaming and running to get away. Everyone was speaking Spanish and I couldn’t understand what they were saying but I knew something terrible had happened,’ said Nóirín, a 29-year old recruitment consultant in Dublin who travelled to Barcelona for a five-day city break.
‘There were a lot of loud noises and banging and then people were running and shouting. The streets were very narrow where I was and a huge volume of people crowded into them.’
‘You didn’t know what you were running from or what you were running to. It was terrifying. There were some English-speaking people and you heard the words ‘terrorist attack’, ‘a van drove into people’, ‘run’, ‘get out of here’.
‘I started to walk and half run in the opposite direction, away from las Ramblas. I then stopped and kind of froze. I was thinking how do I know where to run to. How do I know it’s safe. You could be running into someone with a knife.’
‘The police came very fast. They were also shouting. They were trying to calm people down. I stopped there for a while and then the police started telling everyone to leave the area, to go home to your hotels.’
Nóirín didn’t have her mobile phone or her watch with her and back home in Wexford, her parents Michael, a well-known presenter with South East Radio , and Mary were desperately trying to get in touch with their daughter and growing increasingly worried when they couldn’t contact her.
‘I had been warned about pick pockets and I’d used the phone for maps and directions the first few days so I thought I don’t need it anymore, I’ll leave it in the hotel and I won’t have to worry about it,’ she said.
When her dad couldn’t reach her, he contacted her brother Aindréas who happened to be in a different part of Spain for a wedding. Aindréas telephoned the hotel and was told his sister wasn’t there. He asked staff to leave a note in her room, requesting that she get in touch with her family.
Nóirín’s hotel was a 15-minute walk from the centre and when she got back there, she discovered a stream of messages and missed calls on her phone from worried family and friends. She rang her parents straight away to let them know she was okay.
“I was thinking how do I know where to run...I could be running into someone with a knife”
On Friday, before her return flight that night, the Wexford woman went back into the city centre to attend a minute’s silence for the Barcelona victims which was observed in Placa de Catalunya near Las Ramblas and she was glad to have been a part of the mass gesture of solidarity and support.
‘So many people came out. The city centre was very much back to normal. There was no sign that anything had happened. It was good to go there and show support. That could have been be ’ said Nóirín who is trying not to dwell too much on what might have happened.
‘I think it’s worse when you look back on it. At the time you’re in fight or flight mode. When you think over it you realise you just came off that street a short time earlier and you were so close to it.’
Nóirín had been on Las Ramblas for a few hours and decided to leave the area because it was thronged with tourists in 33 degree heat. She had just started strolling back to her hotel when the terror attack occurred.
‘You feel lucky and you feel bad for saying that when there were so many people who weren’t lucky,’ she said.
Nóirín’s dad Michael said the family were relieved to hear from her. They didn’t know she had left her phone behind and it was very worrying for about an hour and a half when they couldn’t contact her.