A double birthday celebration ended in tragedy for two teenage friends early yesterday. They were killed when the car in which they were travelling with five other people plunged down a 25-foot ravine outside the village of Boolteens, near Castlemaine, Co Kerry.
Lifelong friends Ms Rachel Greensmyth (19) and Ms Claire O'Donnell (18), of Camp, Co Kerry, died instantly when the Peugeot car went off the road in a cul-de-sac near the village as they were dropping friends off at 2.45 a.m. after a night out in Tralee.
Ms O'Donnell would have been 19 tomorrow. Her sister, Carla, who was also in the car, will be 21 on Wednesday. Ms O'Donnell, who was a student in Dublin, had returned to Kerry for the birthday celebrations with her sister and friends.
They had met in a bar in Boolteens, on the main Tralee-Dingle road, before going to a nightclub in Tralee.
It is understood the car in which the seven friends travelled was heading back towards Camp and had made a right turn off the road outside Boolteens to leave two members of the party home.
The car travelled along the dark cul-de-sac for a short distance before mounting an embankment and dropping 25 feet into marshy ground below. Ms Carla O'Donnell was able to scramble from the car and alert local people to the accident.
Two ambulances and a unit of the Killorglin fire brigade were at the scene quickly, but there was no hope of saving the two teenagers, who were pronounced dead at Tralee General Hospital.
The five others in the car, aged between 18 and 21, were treated for injuries at the hospital and released later. News of the tragedy was broken to the small community of Camp yesterday morning at the funeral Mass for another villager, Mrs Nora O'Connor (92).
During the Mass, Father Tom Crean, parish priest of Annascaul, said he had learned with deep shock and sadness that two young people from the village, which is in the parish of Annascaul, had lost their lives. Father Crean asked the congregation to join him in prayers for the two young women.
Father Crean said: "Our hearts go out to the Greensmyth and O'Donnell families in this time of terrible tragedy which has claimed the lives of their two lovely daughters, both beautiful and vivacious; but different in many ways. This tragedy has shocked and numbed our small parish community and every family has been touched by it."
A neighbour of the dead women, who asked not to be named, said the they were "two lovely, quiet, sociable girls" who had been friends since their early schooldays. He said the village was in mourning and local musicians who were to have taken part in a Siamsa Tire traditional music afternoon in Tralee had cancelled their performance. All other social events in the village had been cancelled as well.
Mr Thomas Ashe, a local publican, said news of the tragedy had left everybody in Camp stunned and devastated. The village was in shock, he added.
Last month, three people died - in two separate fires in the Camp-Annascaul area.
A post-mortem examination on the two bodies was carried out yesterday at Tralee General Hospital by Dr Margaret Bolster, assistant State pathologist.