Wrong-way crash survivor 'can't believe it happened again' after deadly M9 joyride

Wrong-way crash survivor 'can't believe it happened again' after deadly M9 joyride Róisín Stakelum survived a strikingly similar collision than the one that claimed the lives of five teenagers on the M9 in Ireland and left a family in hospital A woman seriously injured in a wrong-way motorway crash three years ago says the recent fatal collision on the M9 in Ireland has “brought it all back”. Five teenagers died on Sunday when the car they were travelling in was driven the wrong way down the motorway in Co Kildare and crashed into another vehicle. Jeremy O’Brien, 18, from Carlow; Alex McCarthy, 17, from Carlow; Joey Carthy, 15, from Athy, Kildare; Jack Kennedy, 17, also from Athy; and Kamil Pustkowski, 17, from Limerick were all pronounced dead at the scene Three sisters - Ella Hendricken, Niamh Kinsella and Alma Kinsella - were travelling in the other car with a child to Dublin Airport for a wedding abroad when they were struck by the BMW. They are being treated for serious injuries in hospital. A woman whose life was changed by a strikingly similar collision three years ago has said she “absolutely cannot believe that it has happened again”. Róisín Stakelum said on Saturday: “I’m so upset. It’s really, really affected me. I can’t stop thinking about the girls and the little boy in the car that was crashed into, and what they must be going through, and it’s brought it all back for me. “I haven’t been able to sleep properly since I heard about this, to be honest, and I just can’t believe it’s happened again, and that I don’t feel like there was anything really done to try to prevent something like this from happening again.” Ms Stakelum was also driving to the airport on July 1, 2023 for a holiday before a planned emigration to Australia. Shortly before 1am on the M8, she was struck by a car driven by teenagers the wrong way down the motorway and said she “had no time to react”. Recalling the crash, she said: “I was probably drifting in and out of consciousness, but I remember the headlights, I remember the big bang, and I remember being in the car, absolutely terrified afterwards. “I had had a fairly significant head injury, so everything – like nothing, made sense. I could not comprehend what had happened. “I didn’t know where I was. I had forgotten where I was going. It was just absolutely terrifying.” Ms Stakelum told RTÉ’s Brendan O’Connor radio programme that a “psychological toll” involving fear in the world kicked in when she was leaving the safety of the hospital. “That fear has lived in me since – it hasn’t really gone away. It has improved somewhat, but I am still absolutely terrified of everything.” Ms Stakelum has since been able to return to work two days per week but said “it’s a struggle”, adding: “I still have a lot of physical consequences and psychological consequences that affect my ability to work, and it has affected my trajectory in work.” Asked if she thought she would ever go back to her old life, she said: “No, I don’t. I think my life is always going to be different. “I’m always going to live with the scars, physical and psychological, from what happened to me that night. I’ll never be the same again.” She said she is a completely different person following the crash as she urged everyone to be more careful on the roads, “especially the small cohort of young people” that are driving dangerously on motorways, adding: “It has to stop – it’s absolutely ridiculous. “People that survive crashes like that, they don’t necessarily get their own lives back.” She said she was “angry” that “nothing has been put in place to stop this from happening” again, adding that other European countries have alert systems for wrong-way drivers on motorways. Asked how she feels about the driver who crashed into her, Ms Stakelum said: “Mixed emotions. I have a lot of empathy for him. I have an awful lot of anger as well.” She said he did not have an easy life but added it was “not an excuse”. On the family injured in the crash, she added: “I don’t know what they have ahead of them and trauma can affect people in so many different ways. I don’t know what kind of injuries they have. “All I could say is that it’s going to be … a slow process to get back to normal – and if there’s anything that I can do to help them, I would really like to be able to do that if they were willing to accept my help.” A fundraiser for the family injured in the M9 crash had raised more than 700,000 euro (£600,000) by noon on Saturday.