A pregnant woman and a six-month-old baby girl are among at least 10 people killed in a fire at a Traveller site in Ireland.
The blaze started on a halting site for Irish Travellers in the Carrickmines area of south County Dublin in the early hours of Saturday morning. All the victims were related, with a number of them belonging to the Connors family, who lived at the site in a portable home in the Glenamuck Road.
The dead include a couple, Thomas and Sylvia Connors, and two of their three children. The others who died in the fire were Sylvia Connors’s two brothers, a sister-in-law and her two children, who were visiting the site and staying overnight with them. Five of the ten killed were children aged under 10.
Establishing the exact number of those who died in the blaze has proven difficult on Saturday as the fire was so intense that the identity of all victims could not be confirmed.
Although the Garda Technical Bureau did seal off the area around the halting site on Saturday morning for forensic examination, there appear to have been no signs that the tragedy was anything other than an accident.
The Dublin fire service later said a number of paramedics risked their own lives to rescue young children from the flames engulfing the portable building. During the operation, a number of children were brought to safety, although their current medical conditions are unknown, the fire service said. Two adults are currently being treated in two south Dublin hospitals after suffering smoke inhalation.
A Labour councillor for the area, Lettie McCarthy, said she believed one of the children injured in the fire played for the local De La Salle rugby team. McCarthy has been collecting clothes and food for remaining members of the family, whose possessions were destroyed in the blaze.
The Carrickmines fire is the worst single tragedy to strike the Irish Travelling community in recent history and the region’s worst fire accident since St Valentine’s Day 1981, when 48 people died after a blaze broke in the Stardust club in Artane, North Dublin.
