Road Deaths: 'The sergeant replied: ‘I’m afraid she is gone.’ We were all so heartbroken'
The On Cork, Stone A Picture: Mallow, Near In The Cross Joanne Where 2011 Spot Michael Neil Co Near Died N72 Memorial Herlihy
There are three words etched on Joseph Herlihy’s heart - “She is gone.”
Spoken by a garda at the scene of the crash in which his daughter Joanne died on November 13, 2011, the memory of the moment they were uttered still brings tears to his eyes.
So too does the moment he walked over to her car in the middle of a cordoned off section of the Mallow Road, north Co Cork, and saw her in her seat.
He remembers bending in through the broken driver’s side window to kiss her goodbye.
“She was still warm,” he recalled. “I remember how she was to this very day. There were no visible injuries and she looked as if she was asleep.”
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The first moment he heard there had been a crash, he was at his father-in-law’s house a short distance away in Ruskeen, Castlemagner. He and his wife Joan had gone there earlier, as they usually did, for Sunday lunch.
Joanne, who was a nurse at the South Infirmary in Cork city, usually stayed there as it was easier to get to after long shifts at the hospital. As well as that, she had spent a lot of time helping look after her grandmother, and had nursed her right up until Nora’s death at the end of October.
The 22-year-old would normally be expected back at around 8pm.
“It was usually sometime around that that we would expect her home,” he said.
“When she hadn’t arrived, we gave her a call on her mobile but there wasn’t any reply. We didn’t really think much of it until a short while later, we heard from one of my sister-in-laws who said that she had heard there had been a crash up the road.
“I decided to go down there because I just assumed Joanne was probably going to be helping out with the accident and I’d see her there.
“When I arrived, I saw the flashing light of a garda car and there was a fire engine there but I didn't see any ambulances, on the road, which was blocked in both directions.
“I remember walking up to the sergeant and he turned to me and asked if I was alright and could he help. I told him my daughter was due home and I came to see if she was maybe helping out as she was a nurse.
“He asked me what her name was and I told him. 'Oh', he said, ‘we have established that the car was actually registered to Joanne Herlihy’.
“I asked him: ‘How bad is it?’.
“He paused, and then replied ‘I’m afraid she is gone’."
“I recognised it as the silver Toyota Corolla she had bought from one of my sons. She used to ask me to wash it every time she came home.
“I was just numb as I walked towards the car. I didn’t see anybody around. I could just see her sitting there in the car, motionless.
“It was unreal. In my head, I was trying to make sense of it all as I approached her. I’d prefer it to have been that way than getting a knock on the door.”
He stops for a moment, and then adds: “Sadly, for once I could not do anything to help her out.”
He said that to this day, his daughter sitting in the car is an image that sticks with him.
“Thanks be to God, her face wasn’t touched,” he said.
“She looked the same.”
His eyes glass up as he said: “Her death has left us heartbroken.”
After he had said goodbye to Joanne, his phone rang and it was one of his two sons.
“Is she alright, he asked?” he recalled.
“I told him ‘It’s not good’ and he asked ‘How bad’.
“I told him ‘she’s gone’ and he hung up.”
Joseph stayed with his daughter for about 30 minutes before gardaí told him they would call him when the fire brigade had removed her from the car and were ready to take her to Cork University Hospital for an autopsy.
After another 90 minutes, he got the call. He and the rest of the family went to the crash site to pay their respects to her as she lay on a stretcher ready to be taken to Cork.
“She was a lovely, lovely girl and had so much going for her,” he said.
“She had just qualified as a nurse and she was due to go to London to start work in a hospital there. We had been against it because there had been a lot of violence in a lot of towns and cities in England a few months previously.”
He was referring to the England or London riots that followed the shooting dead by police of a suspected gang member.
“There was nothing appealing about London to us at the time,” Joseph said.
“We didn’t want her to come to any harm and thought it better to let some time pass before going over.
“Instead of going to London for an interview she had with a hospital in London, she did it over the phone and we later found out she passed.”
A few days after she died, her mobile phone rang and Joseph left it ring for a few days before he finally plucked the courage to answer it.
“It was the hospital,” he said.
“They were wanting to know where she was as she had been due to start work two days after she died.
“I told them that she would not be coming as she had died in a car crash.”
Marking the spot a short distance from where Joanne died is the roadside memorial to her that was erected by her uncle and her aunt.
Anybody who drives to and from Mallow with any frequency cannot help but see it.
It sits on an immaculately mown 20 ft-wide stretch of grass that runs from the hard shoulder up to the top of a bank bordering a field at Gearanskagh as you drive out towards Killarney on the N72.
It is a simple stone cross, with a celtic script engraved at its head.
The inscription on it reads: “Joanne, you leaving us was a heartache that no one can heal, but your love leaves a memory no one can steal.”
The last time he spoke to Joanne was the Monday before she died.
“She was in great form,” he recalled.
“As usual, she asked if I would do her a favour — she always asked this whenever she was home.
“She asked if I would wash her car. I would have replied that surely she could get it washed at one of the machines she’d be crossing on her way back from the city.
“But she would always say that whatever I did to her car, or put in the water, nobody could get it as clean as good as me, so I would wash it for her.”
The Friday before she died, her new nurse’s uniform and little graduation watch had arrived as she had just graduated.
The uniform is in a drawer in her bedroom.
“Sadly, not only did she never wear it, she never even saw it,” Joseph said. "She was a brilliant student. I’d be up at 6.30am for work and she’d be up before me."
The hard work showed in her results.
“She had another one 12 months later. That was some achievement but the amazing thing was she never told her friends.
“She just brought each one home, showed them to us and put them in a folder and that was it. Her friends never knew until we put one of the Certs up on her coffin in the funeral home.
“They told us ‘she never told us’. The reality is she didn’t want to be a step above them.”
There is a phrase that annoys him when people engage with him about Joanne, and it was one which was mostly said in the days after she died.
“I got it at the time, and it was ‘she has gone to a better place’,” he said.
“No, no she hasn’t. She’s not at home with her family, or at work or out with her friends. She had a great place here, thanks very much.”
Asked if his faith has helped him deal with his daughter’s death, he shakes his head.
“My faith was good enough up to the day she died. After that, I kind of lost it for a few years.
“I would be looking up to him and saying to him: ‘what did I do to you?’ 'Why did you pick Joanne'? 'Why did you take her'?
“Why didn’t you take me?”
After all he and his family have been through, his best advice to anybody using the roads today is simply this: “You never know when something might happen, and when it does, it can happen in an instant.
“If you are lucky, you get to walk away. Always bear in mind, your luck might run out one day and you could be gone in an instant.
“People really need to mind themselves on the roads, and that is all there is to it.
“When you go to a friend’s funeral, you will always feel sorry for your friends and their families. But when it comes to your door, and they are one of your own, that’s when reality hits.”