A man has been sentenced to six months in prison for careless driving that led to the death of an unborn baby in Co Wexford.
Yurii Dudek (31), with an address at Chernivtsi, Oblast, Ukraine, was sentenced by Judge Cormac Quinn at Wexford Circuit Criminal Court on Friday after previously pleading guilty.
The collision happened on the N25 road between Wexford and Rosslare on January 27th, 2024.
The court heard Dudek was in Ireland to collect medical supplies and humanitarian aid for the Ukrainian army and people impacted by the war with Russia.
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Garda John O’Flynn on Thursday gave evidence that the Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van Dudek was driving rear-ended another vehicle that had stopped to turn into a driveway.
The garda said the rear-ended vehicle was pushed into oncoming traffic, hitting the car in which Saoirse Aylward and her partner Nathan Ferguson-Murphy were travelling.
The court heard that Saoirse Aylward was 31 weeks pregnant at the time and had to have an emergency Caesarean section after being brought by ambulance to Wexford General Hospital. When she woke up after the procedure, she was told her son, Jax, was stillborn.
The judge on Friday said the victim-impact statements provided were the most “compelling, distressing and moving statements that one could hear”.
In her statement, Saoirse Aylward said she was aware that no sentence can undo what happened or bring Jax back.
“Nothing can restore my body or mind to what they were before that night. However, accountability matters. Recognition matters. Acknowledgment of the full harm caused matters, not only to me, but to my family and to the memory of my son.”
She added: “I lost the opportunity to hear him call me ‘Mama’ or to say ‘I love you’, to watch him take his first steps, to bring him to his first day of school. I will never see him grow into a young man, fall in love, get married, or build a life of his own. He will never have the future we imagined for him.”
The judge said there were several mitigating factors in the case, including Dudek’s age, the fact his guilty plea saved the matter from going to trial and the fact he had no previous convictions in Ireland or Ukraine.
He said Dudek was distraught following the incident and genuinely remorseful for what happened. However, he said a custodial sentence was “inevitable and appropriate”.
The maximum sentence was two years, he said, and he set a headline sentence of nine months, reduced to six months after taking the mitigating factors into account.
The judge said he would credit Dudek for any time already spent in custody and would not suspend his driving licence as it was needed for his voluntary work.
Saoirse Aylward has been campaigning for legislative reform to address what she described as a “gap” in the law.
In a statement issued following the sentencing, she said: “Jax’s Law proposes that babies who die as a result of fatal road collisions during pregnancy are recognised in their own right within the justice system.
“This was not a single moment in my life. It has altered every part of my present and every part of my future. I have been given a life sentence and will live with the consequences of someone’s actions that night for the rest of my life.
“My hope is that some good can come from this and that no other mother, no other grieving family, will experience the additional pain of discovering that their child’s life is not formally recognised within our justice system.”
