Close to €200k raised for three sisters and young boy seriously injured in M9 crash
Sarah Slater and Vivienne Clarke
Close to €200,000 has been raised for three sisters and a seven-year-old boy who were seriously injured in a collision on the M9 crash, which claimed the lives of five male teenagers in the early hours of Sunday morning last.
Sisters Alma and Niamh Kinsella, aged in their 30s, were in the front of their Hyundai car while their younger sister Ellie Hendricken, who is in her 20s, was in a rear seat passenger along with her nephew.
Alma and Niamh remain in a critical condition in Tallaght University Hospital, while their younger sister Ellie, is being treated for serious injuries in St Vincent’s University Hospital after she was transferred from St Luke’s Hospital in Kilkenny.
The boy, who was also seriously injured, is being treated in Children's Health Ireland in Crumlin. All four are from the Carlow area.
The four were making their way to Dublin Airport to attend a family wedding in Cheshire in the UK when the collision occurred around 3am between junctions 3 and 4 close to Moone, Co Kildare.
Their car was being driven the correct way on the motorway. The teenagers who were in a BMW car were driving the wrong way down the motorway between junctions 3 and 4 close to Moone, Co Kildare.
The teenagers who died in the collision were Joe “Joey” Carthy (15) and Jack Kennedy (17), both from Athy, Alex McCarthy (17) and Jeremy O’Brien both from Carlow and Kamil Pustkowski (17) from Limerick.
Post-mortem examinations on their bodies have been carried out at Naas General Hospital. The bodies of the teenage boys were removed from the wreckage late on Sunday following the conclusion of forensic examinations by garda technical teams.
The teenagers, some of whom were related to each other, were wearing masks when they died and aligned to a large group known to gardaí around the Carlow-Kildare region.
A friend of Ella, Bryan Curley, launched the GoFundMe.com fundraiser, which has received more than 7,000 donations and has raised €197,729 so far.
Mr Curley explained that the collision has resulted in “an incredibly difficult and frightening time for Ella, Niamh, Alma and their family”.
He continued: “They are facing a long and challenging road ahead, and right now, I ask that you keep them all in your thoughts and prayers.”
The funeral notice Mr Carthy, one of the teenagers killed, was removed from RIP.ie, due to highly emotive comments due to the circumstances of the fatal collision.
Funeral notices for the four other teenagers are yet to be published. In a statement, RIP.ie said that they “do not comment on individual death notices. Funeral Directors are the only ones who can place or remove a death notice.
In a statement, Garda headquarters based in the Phoenix Park said the family of the victims of the M9 collision has asked for their “privacy to be respected”.
The statement said: “They wish to inform the media that they are not providing interviews at this time.”
Meanwhile, Sinn Féin TD Joanna Byrne has said her party would be supportive of the gardaí being fully resourced “to ensure that they can manage the bad behaviour and criminal behaviour that's costing lives on our roads and anywhere in our society.”
Speaking on Newstalk Breakfast with Anton Savage, Byrne, who is the party’s spokesperson on media, also expressed concern about the sharing of videos of illegal activity on the roads on platforms like TikTok.
She said the topic has been a focus of the media committee intensively for several months. "We've had multiple hearings and listened to groups discuss online safety and particularly online safety for those of a younger age. And what was abundantly clear to us throughout all of them and all of the engagement with stakeholders is that online activity - bad online activity - is not confined to individual bad actors, participants, if that's the word I'm looking for."
She said it is also driven by platform design choices and "models that maximise engagement and kind of glorifies bad behaviour for increased and enhanced likes and shares and engagement with the platform".
“We've also seen that there's insufficient regulatory enforcement, and we've covered this topic extensively, perhaps probably more focused on the AI deepfakes and stuff like that. But it's a similar pattern of behaviour, and it's a similar lack of decisive action and control by big tech companies.”
“But we're at a point in time where we've seen immense tragedy take place in recent days, where multiple young people lost their lives and others were seriously injured. So it just shows you that this small bit that doesn't get taken down as quickly as it needs to can have a domino effect and a roll-on effect. Anything that goes on the internet can blow up into anything in an instant."
Byrne said Coimisiún na Mean has a crucial role to play. "We live in an online-based society where we work online. We socialise online. And all of this bad behaviour needs to be choked at the start to ensure that it doesn't roll out and blow out and amplify and evolve.”
