Mother may have returned to house to try to save children

ANNE RYAN was asleep at her home at No 5 Marian Hill, when the siren at Portarlington fire station went off shortly before 5 a.m. yesterday.

A nurse, she would soon have been getting up to work the early shift in St Brigid's Psychiatric Hospital in Portlaoise.

"It was a terrible, piercing sound - it frightened me out of my skin. And I remember thinking I'd say a prayer for whoever was in the fire. Then I realised it was Mahers, four doors down."

She ran into the street and found 25 year old Colm Maher - critically ill in hospital - lying on the grass in the front of No 1. She ran back to her house to get blankets: "I was thinking we could use blankets to catch people in case anyone had to jump from an upstairs window. But we went to the front of the house and then the back and there were no sounds of life at all. Just bursting glass and the noise of the flames.

In the street across the road, Carmel Crombie was woken up by the sound of windows exploding. "I looked out and first I thought it was my mother's house at number 3. When I got up there the damage was already done. The smoke was so thick that even outside the house it would choke you."

As firemen shovelled debris out of the burned out shell yesterday morning, other neighbours gathered outside trying to absorb what had happened.

In the midst of the collective tragedy, there were individual tragedies to dwell on, like that of 12 year old Barry Maher. He suffered from muscular dystrophy and could walk only with difficulty, but his enthusiasm for football had seen him appointed "honorary" manager of a team at school.

His older brother Colm, who is critically ill in hospital, has played county football for Laois. A local hero already, he appears to have suffered serious injuries when the stairs collapsed as he was trying to carry his infant sister to safety.

There was praise, too, for Breda Maher, who apparently died after going back into the house to try to save her children. "You never saw as good a mother. She doted on them all - you'd often see her out on the green kicking football with them," one woman said.

Neighbours spoke about how united the Maher family had been, how steeped they were in the local community and especially the GAA club, in which Mrs Maher was particularly active.

They spoke about how the community in turn had stood by the Mahers. As recently as Thursday last, there had been a benefit function to raise funds for an extension to the back of the house to facilitate Barry, and a local support group for people with disabilities had already paid his fare for a trip to Lourdes in July.

"They were a lovely family," said Brigid Emerson, a neighbour, member of the fund raising group and mother of another Laois footballer, Hugh Emerson. "They were never in trouble and they were always very together in everything they did. It's a terrible tragedy. My family is the same age group and it hurts to think about it."

The Portarlington community was again rallying around Aloysius "Allo" Maher and the other survivors yesterday. Offers of all kinds of help flooded in and the GAA set up an account in the local AIB bank to which wellwishers could contribute.

Marian Hill was originally built as a county council development but the homes are now privately owned. It stands almost in the shadow of the ESB power station which closed in 1991, leaving Allo, among others, without a job to support his family of 13.

But the Mahers were not an unusually large family, even for Marian Hill. Their neighbours in No 3 were also a family of 13, and there were 14 in No 5. The point was brought home by Carmel Crombie, whose brother in law is serving with the UN in Bosnia but who had heard the news of the fire within a couple of hours yesterday morning.

Anne Ryan eventually went to work yesterday morning, after wrapping a wet blanket around Colm Maher and then helping to place a drip in his arm. It wasn't until she got to work that the full realisation of what had happened dawned on her and she had to go home again.

"It's the biggest tragedy that's ever happened in Portarlington," she said. "To think that half of a young family were wiped out at a stroke - there's never been anything else like it."