Victim’s sister recalls Rescue 116 heartbreak
THE three-year-old son of the late Captain Dara Fitzpatrick sang the nursery rhyme, The Wheels On The Bus in the back of the car as her family drove to Mayo to collect his mother’s body following the Rescue 116 tragedy.
In an interview with Marian Finucane on RTÉ Radio 1 yesterday, Dara’s sister Niamh spoke about being in the helicopter pilot’s home with her young son as information about the disaster began to emerge.
‘I’ll never forget it, walking into the kitchen and seeing two men there, one was a pilot and one was an engineer… I saw them there in the kitchen and they just said I needed to hear it for myself.
‘I said, “What’s happened?” And they said, “The helicopter’s gone down. We don’t know.” ‘We spent the day there in the house, in Dara’s house. It was surreal – you’re surrounded by her things, you’re surrounded by photos of her. Fionn, he’s three. He’s oblivious, we’re getting him up, you get him breakfast, people start coming into the house. ‘You sit around this table, you look at each other, nobody has said it yet but you just know this is very unlikely to come out well.’ She also recalled how the family travelled to collect her sister’s remains: ‘You’re in this cavalcade of cars being driven, and we’re heading to Mayo to get Dara… you have Fionn singing, “the wheels on the bus…” He’s chatting, he’s laughing – he has no clue that we’re going to get his mamma. It just was so unreal.’
Fionn is the adopted son of Captain Fitzpatrick – and is now being raised by her family.
Orla Smith, sister of the late winchman Ciarán Smith, also spoke to the Marian Finucane show yesterday. She said she always knew there was serious danger attached to her brother’s occupation – but thought he would survive anything that it threw at him.
‘It was already in the back of my mind that something could happen to him. I never thought it would and I always thought he would survive anything that would happen to him, but it was certainly there in the back of my head he is doing a risky job here, something could potentially happen,’ she said.