“Shocking and tragic”: the Irish Prime Minister called on Saturday to shed light on the explosion of a service station which killed ten people including three children the day before in a small village in the north-west.
The blast happened around 3.20pm on Friday in the village of Creeslough. “She had ten victims,” a police official told a press conference. They are four men, three women, two teenagers (a boy and a girl) and a girl, of primary school age, he explained.
“The information we have at present points to a tragic accident,” he said again, seeming to rule out a voluntary act. But the police keep an “open mind”.
“We do not expect there to be other victims,” added the official. There is no information on missing persons.
An aerial photograph taken after the blast shows the destroyed gas station and two collapsed two-story apartment buildings.
“It was like a bomb,” local resident Kieran Gallagher, whose house is about 150 meters away, told the BBC when he heard an explosion.
The emergency services, accompanied by sniffer dogs to find victims, worked throughout the night.
“Very dark day”
The rubble continued to be picked up Saturday morning while a mass was celebrated in the church of the village devastated by “a tsunami of grief”, said priest John Joe Duffy.
“It’s a very dark day for Donegal (the county where Creeslough is located, editor’s note) and for Ireland”, a “truly shocking and tragic event”, lamented the Irish Prime Minister Michael Martin who came to the scene in the afternoon.
“The scale and enormity of what happened, in such a small town, means almost everyone knows someone who lost their life,” he said.
The village of Creelough, which is about fifty kilometers from the border with Northern Ireland, has about 400 inhabitants.
“We must shed light on all this,” he added, thanking the rescuers. “There are a number of deaths and injuries that we no longer want to see happening when people go about their daily lives.”
The Irish Police, Fire, Ambulance Services and Coastguard were supported by the Northern Ireland Air Ambulance Service as well as a team of specialists from the British province on Saturday.
Letterkenny University Hospital, 15 miles from the service station, was placed on an emergency and said in a statement it was caring for “multiple injuries”.
Agriculture Minister Charlie McConalogue, who is an elected member of the Irish parliament from the blast-hit region, compared the scenes of devastation to those of the Northern Irish conflict in the second half of the 20th century.
“The scenes of the event are reminiscent of images of ‘The Troubles’ years ago, in terms of the damage and debris.”
For three decades, the conflict in Northern Ireland opposed nationalists, mainly Catholics, in favor of the reunification of the island of Ireland, and loyalists, mainly Protestants, attached to maintaining the province under the British crown. This conflict caused around 3,500 deaths.
“Our thoughts and prayers are with the families and friends of those who died, those who were injured and the entire community of Creeslough,” tweeted Applegreen, which owns the stricken gas station. the explosion and who said she was “upset”.