Dangerous driving caused two deaths

A young man was jailed for 12 months and banned from driving for 10 years yesterday by a judge who told him that his recklessness and negligence had caused two people to die needlessly.

Mark Durcan (22), from Carrunaglough, Bonniconlon, Ballina , Co Mayo, was convicted on June 10th of two counts of dangerous driving causing death.

Judge Miriam Reynolds told Durcan in Sligo Circuit Court that Ms Ursula Kearns (42), from Eskeragh, Tubbercurry, Co Sligo, and 13-year-old Joanne Henry, from Curry, Co Sligo, had died directly as result of his driving.

Ms Kearns had been taking her 13-year-old daughter, Imelda, and Joanne, who was Imelda's best friend, to their first disco on March 16th, 2004, when their car collided with Durcan's after he drove through a junction governed by a number of 'Stop' signs.

In a victim impact statement, Imelda Kearns recalled how she had been thrown out of the car and trapped underneath it following the collision. She did not remember that, but when she woke up at the scene she recalled that there were a lot of people walking around.

"I could hear mommy lying beside me," she recalled. "I could feel her trying to hold my hand."

The girl stated that her arm was broken and she had to ask her mother to let it go. Her mother was very distressed and had tried to get up at one stage. Imelda said that she had tried to reassure her mother and had told her that everything would be okay "but I could not be more wrong".

She had tried to hold her mother's hand but could only rub her head. Everything went quiet and she thought her mother had fallen asleep, but in fact "my mother and my best friend had died beside me". Imelda recalled that it was freezing cold as she lay there. "My body was numb. All I could see were the stars in the sky."

Later at the hospital she noticed that nobody mentioned Joanne or her mother but when her dad got a phone call from the funeral director, "I knew either Joanne or mommy had died".

The court also heard excerpts of a victim impact statement prepared by Ursula Kearns' husband, Declan Kearns, in which he stated he had had a lot of sympathy for Durcan and his family, but that it had diminished when he pleaded not guilty. Mr Kearns said that the families had sat through three tough days in court "listening to excuses and so-called expert opinion" about why the warning signs were ignored.

In his opinion, the accused had taken a chance and had driven though a crossroads without yielding to the 'Stop' signs. "When people take a chance they must take the consequences which, in this case, were the deaths of two very special people," he stated.

Judge Reynolds said that the needless deaths of two people who should have had long lives ahead of them had a profound effect on their loved ones. Many lives had been changed by the negligence and dangerous driving of another.

The court heard that Durcan had been working as a machine driver on the M50 in Dublin and had been on his way home to Mayo that night after completing his shift. He had just taken a slip road, off the N17, the main Galway/Sligo road, avoiding the town of Tubbercurry.

Judge Reynolds said that he had passed a number of warning signs including a large 'Slow' sign, a luminous sign warning that there was a crossroads ahead and a 'Stop' sign.

She accepted the defendant's evidence about how sorry he was.