A day of heroics and terrible loss

THAILAND: A year after the tsunami took his girlfriend, Eilis Finnegan, Dubliner Barry Murphy talks to Catherine Cleary about loss, guilt and the lottery of survival

He never saw the boy in the Spiderman pyjamas again and would love to know what became of him. Barry Murphy peeled the child's small arms from round his neck and let him stand down on the floor of a hotel in the care of a local woman who knew him. The boy and the young Irishman who had saved his life had both been pummelled with brown salty ocean. Then, as he left the boy, Barry noticed that he was still holding a bag with a pair of child's pink slippers in his tightly-gripped fist.

Someone has since sent Barry a book partly written by the tsunami orphans, the children who survived the St Stephen's Day catastrophe which washed their parents away. He studied the photographs, but nothing clicked. He thinks he would recognise the boy if he stood in front of him.

The Thai boy lost his mother and sister and Barry Murphy lost his girlfriend, Éilís Finnegan, when the huge wave struck on St Stephen's Day last year.

It took eight days of searching before Barry was able to identify Éilís's body from a photograph on a noticeboard. She was one of four Irish victims of the tsunami, along with Connor Keightley, Lucy Coyle and Michael Murphy - all of them young holidaymakers. Three of the four were lost on Phi Phi island. Michael Murphy was killed on Khao Lak.

There were so many twists and turns, Éilís and Barry could easily have been kept away from Phi Phi island that morning. They had stepped down from the Phuket ferry on to the warm sand of Ton Sai beach just 15 minutes before the wave struck.

A sequence of steps took them there that morning. As a team leader in the United Airlines call centre in Dublin, Éilís was entitled to fly standby with her partner, so they had hopped from Dublin to London, to Chicago, and then on to Asia. Each time they waited for the numbers to fall their way and for two standby seats to come up on a flight.

The couple had met at UA some eight months earlier, where Barry was a human resources consultant. They were due to spend just 90 minutes on Phi Phi before catching the Khao Lak ferry that morning. Barry wonders if they had been sitting closer to the beach, instead of at a café table further up, would he have recognised the warning signs as the sea retreated?

He had studied geography at college and knew about tsunamis. All they saw that morning was two fishermen jumping out of their hammocks to save boats which had tipped over in the small bay as the sea retreated. They watched bemused. Then the water started lapping over the concrete café floor and the young couple jumped to move their backpacks out of the way.

They were sitting at a table, having ordered their breakfast, and Barry was looking at the Lonely Planet guide. When the water started to rise they wondered if they should try to pay the bill before running. Then they saw that the waitress who had taken their order was herself running and they got to their feet.

Barry scooped the camera and guidebook from the café table and Éilís sprinted on ahead. As he ran after her, the volume of the water increased and became filled with things such as potted plants, which were being washed along in the strong current.

"Very quickly, it was up to our knees, and I couldn't see what I was running from," Barry recalls.

He moved to his right and ran into a space between a low-rise row of shops. A woman holding a small girl in her arms came into the passageway. A boy was following behind. Aged only about three or four, the boy was having difficulty in the rising water. Barry reached down and picked him up.

"I could see people being swept away from either side of us. Things from the shop were going by in the water. There was a set of bongo drums, a beach football, a postcard stand. Then the water reached up to my waist and I wedged my rucksack further up between my back and the wall to keep it out of the water."

He thinks it was that instinctive move of trying to keep his rucksack dry that saved his life. Suddenly, the wall collapsed on one side of him, crushing the woman and the little girl. Then the corrugated iron roof collapsed. The extra few inches of rucksack above his head took the main brunt of the blow. Then he and the boy took their "last breaths" and the water closed over their heads.

He does not know how much time passed, but he had said a full "Our Father" in the water.

Submerged in the torrent, there was a kind of washing-machine effect and he could feel himself being buffeted by debris. "I got to the end," he says. "I started breathing in the water and then the water levels came down."

Everything was dark, but then he saw a light. In his shock and confusion, he wondered if this was what happened when a person died.

"The little boy was still there, still alive, traumatised. But he had not suffered any ill-effects."

Barry waited for the water to drain away and then vomited. He tried to prise the boy's hands from around his neck so that he could climb down and lift the child to safety, but he would not let go. He abandoned the rucksack and climbed carefully out over the jagged edges of the corrugated structure with the boy still clinging to him.

The first person he saw was a German tourist who had been sitting at the table next to them with his girlfriend. The man was screaming for his girlfriend. The rush of water had broken the grip of their clasped hands and she had been washed away.

After leaving the boy with a woman and her child in the hotel, Barry went in search of Éilís. "I was shouting for her, conscious that she could have been washed up or down."

Teams of holidaymakers were mobilising to help the injured and trapped. There were people in trees who needed to be helped down. Two men risked their lives by tunnelling to free an Italian man who had become caught in a wall of debris.

Five hotels were still standing. When Barry reached the last of these and made his way out on to the roof and still had not found Éilís, his worst fears set in.

"As time went by, my hope at that stage was that she was injured," he says.

All the time he was searching his instinct was to help as many people as he could. "It still surprises me now that while obviously Éilís was the priority, I stopped to help others."

After about six hours, an army helicopter made a drop of water and biscuits.

The following morning, a rescue boat evacuated Barry to Phuket, where he went to the hospital to have his cuts and gashes treated. Internet access had been provided in the hospital, so he was able to send an e-mail to his family. He had texted in the early hours of the morning from a phone he borrowed from a Japanese tourist. "The only numbers I could remember were my sister's and the number of my boss, so I texted something like 'I'm okay. Eilis still missing'."

The day after he arrived in Phuket Barry met the Irish ambassador to Thailand and Malaysia, Dan Mulhall, who had set up an Irish desk in the emergency centre. In his search for Éilís he would soon meet the other Irish families searching for their loved ones.

It was the grimmest of tasks. The rate of decomposition of bodies was shockingly swift. In the heat, the waterlogged bodies were becoming less identifiable by the hour. Barry and Dan Mulhall walked through the makeshift morgues looking at lines of bodies in the hope of spotting a likeness or a T-shirt which might offer a clue.

"That is the burning memory. But each day prepared you for the next," he recalls.

After about a week, the bodies had become unrecognisable, so photographs were posted instead.

Éilís's best friend, Sinéad Ní Mhuircartaigh, a garda, arrived in Thailand to help in the search. She brought a dental X-ray.

By January 7th, Éilís's body had been positively identified and Barry flew her remains home. He returned to work within a week of getting back to Ireland. "People in my job were brilliant at the time. Everyone was fantastic," he says.

Earlier this month, the college Éilís had been attending posthumously awarded her the business management degree she had been completing.

There have been lots of other landmarks and anniversaries. Barry turned 30 this year.

"I'm happy to remember her, and in a way it's nice that others will be remembering people they lost that day, too. I don't know how tough the actual anniversary day will be," Barry says.

Had he experienced the "survivor guilt" some disaster survivors go through?

"Yes, for the first day or so, probably to some degree. But once I got back to the mainland and saw the scale of the disaster, it was a relief. It wasn't just the few square miles of island that we were on. Survival was a complete lottery."

Barry says that he has not suffered flashbacks or nightmares about his own ordeal.

"I dream about Éilís a lot and it doesn't bring back the bad memories. I never have had horrible dreams about it. They always focus on Éilís as she was, and I'm thankful for that."