The early morning fire which killed a child in a house in Killarney, Co Kerry, started downstairs and may have been burning for hours, fire officers at the scene said yesterday.
The mother of Rebekah Goienetxe-Bawden, Ms Stephanie Bawden, and a male occupant escaped through a front upstairs window.
Forensic officers were examining the house yesterday to determine the cause.
The child was just two weeks short of her second birthday. She was sleeping in a back upstairs bedroom in the mid-terrace house at 21 O'Sullivan's Place, Killarney. Fire officers found her lying underneath her bed. She had died at the scene.
A post-mortem examination was being carried out later yesterday.
When rescue personnel arrived at 5.45 a.m. they tried to gain entry through the front but were beaten back by the intense heat and flames. The hall and stairs were completely engulfed and the room the child was in was "totally engulfed", said Mr Padraig Mangan, acting fire station officer.
Three units of the fire brigade, two from Killarney and one from Killorglin, were at the scene. They had tried to gain entry also from a flat roof, but to no avail. Three lives could have been lost, Mr Mangan said.
It appeared that the fire had started at the back of the house, possibly in the kitchen, he said.
Neighbours who went to the back of the house with ladders and broke the window with a hatchet could hear the child's cries, but could do nothing to help, such was the ferocity of the blaze.
The two adults escaped with the help of a ladder provided by neighbours. They were taken to Tralee General Hospital, but were not seriously injured.
The 1940s house in an old residential area near Killarney town centre was being rented by Ms Bawden.
It had been done up in the past year, when the previous tenants moved out, and new windows and electrical wiring had been put in, neighbours said.