Berkeley tragedy: Remains of Olivia Burke arrive in Dublin

The remains of Olivia Burke, one of the victims of the Berkeley balcony collapse, have arrived at Dublin Airport.

Ms Burke (21), a student at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, was killed along with her American-born cousin Ashley Donohoe (22) in the early hours of Tuesday morning in San Francisco.

Both the Burke and Donohoe families were on the flight from San Francisco which arrived into Dublin Airport this morning at 11.33am.

They were accompanied by an official from the Department of Foreign Affairs and one from the US embassy in Dublin.

The funeral cortege was met by motorcycle outriders and a garda escort as it made its way from Terminal 2.

Ashley’s parents George and Jackie, who emigrated to the United States in 1989, will be attending Ms Burke’s funeral service at Our Lady of Perpetual Church in Foxrock on Wednesday at 11am.

The plan at present is for a Government minister to attend each of the funerals in turn which take place this week.

Ms Donohoe, an Irish-American citizen of Dublin parents, was laid to rest near her hometown of Rohert Park, north of San Francisco on Saturday.

Six students were killed on June 16th when the fourth-floor balcony they were standing on collapsed at a birthday party at the Library Gardens student accommodation block in Berkeley, California.

The remaining 34 students who were in the Berkeley apartment also arrived back in Dublin on Monday morning in order attend the funerals of the remaining four students in Dublin, which take place on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week.

The remains of Eoghan Culligan, Lorcán Miller, Niccolai Schuster and Eimear Walsh were returned home to Ireland on Sunday.

Mr Culligan’s funeral mass will be held at the Church of the Annunciation, Rathfarnham, at 11am on Tuesday and he is to be buried at Mount Jerome Cemetery, Harold’s Cross.

Mr Schuster’s funeral mass will take place at the Church of the Three Patrons, Rathgar on Wednesday at 11am followed by cremation at Mount Jerome, Harold’s Cross.

Ms Walsh’s funeral mass will take place at 11am on Tuesday, at the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, Foxrock followed by burial at Shanganagh Cemetery.

The seven other students who were injured in last Tuesday’s tragedy remain in three hospitals in the Bay Area.

Some of the students are said to have injuries which may require weeks and in some cases many months of healing and rehabilitation. Their families are weighing up whether to remain in the Bay Area, where medical treatment may be better than Ireland.

The students who died in Berkeley were remembered along with the African American shooting victims in South Carolina at a memorial Mass in San Francisco.

Speaking at the Mass, Fr Brendan McBride of the Irish Immigration Pastoral Centre said people had travelled from England, Austria, Australia, Canada and across the US after the tragedy and were picked up at the airport and taken to the hospitals.

“When a tragedy like this happens, 5,000 miles from home, we are dealing with a tyranny of distance,” said Fr McBride. “We are separated from family and friends at home by airports, by miles, by emotional barriers that cannot be solved by the social media.”

Minister of State for the Diaspora Jimmy Deenihan, who attended the mass, praised the estimated 800 Irish J-1 students in the San Francisco Bay Area. "They have shown how sensitive and how caring the present generation of the Irish are now," he said. "They have certainly given me great hope for the future of our country."

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, who delivered the homily at a Mass on Saturday in Dublin’s Pro Cathedral dedicated to the six students, said the events in Berkeley should cause people to search within themselves for the “goodness and integrity” that was inherent in the students who died.

“People from all walks of life... spoke of these young people in terms of their talents and giftedness, of their joyful spirit, of their personal hopes for their own future and what they represented for our future as a nation and a society,” he said.

Preliminary investigations of the apartment block in Berkeley where the balcony collapsed last week have found that wooden flooring the building showed signs of suspected dry rot, a condition causing deterioration in timber.

The housing code enforcement section of the planning and development department at Berkeley city council carried out inspections at the apartment block as part of the authority’s rental housing safety programme, documents show.

In a statement on its website, posted last Friday, the authority said it would be posting as many documents online as possible for public examination, as part of its continued investigation into the balcony collapse. The documents include building inspection history, building permits, housing code enforcement files and zoning files.

Separately, the San Francisco Chronicle has reported that Segue Construction, the company responsible for waterproofing the Library Gardens apartments in 2007, also worked on a complex where a dozen balconies were undermined by water infiltration and had to be rebuilt.

The California firm also paid out $3 million (€2.6 million) last year to settle a case over alleged defects in The Pines apartments in San Jose. The legal action alleged water damage on balconies and windows.