Four Donegal crash victims were Latvian
Four of the five people killed in yesterday’s two-car collision in Co Donegal were Latvian nationals, it emerged today.
The Latvian Embassy in Dublin confirmed that police in the EU accession state have now informed the victims’ families of the tragedy.
It is the second multiple fatality involving Latvians on the Inishowen Peninsula’s roads in less than two years.
Three young people died when their car crashed into a stone bridge after midnight in June 2004.
In the latest incident on the Buncrana-Derry road, a 38-year-old woman and her 20-year-old daughter from Liepaja were among the dead.
A 23-year-old man from Liepaja and a woman in her late twenties from Valka, on the border with Estonia, also died.
The fifth victim of the head-on collision around 4am on Saturday was a 35-year-old Lithuanian man, gardaí confirmed.
The sole survivor of the crash, another Latvian, is in a stable condition in Letterkenny General Hospital.
Gardaí, who are expected to release the victims’ names later, are still appealing for witnesses to the accident at a sharp bend at Lisfannon.
One of the cars is believed to have burst into flames on impact at the scene.
First Secretary of the Latvian Embassy, Ivars Lasis, confirmed that the bodies of the victims may be flown home next week.
He said: “We are now waiting for the post mortems to be carried out and hopefully we can take the bodies home in the next few days.”
Garda Commissioner Noel Conroy told an Oireachtas Transport Committee last month that he was concerned about the growing number of fatal road accidents involving foreign nationals.
He said: “We note, particularly at weekends, that we have a major problem in that area. Some of the residents from those countries apparently drink quite a lot of alcohol at weekends.
“We’re finding more and more difficulties in this area of dealing with non-nationals. Certain countries are causing us more problems than others.”
The Donegal tragedy brought the death toll on the state’s roads so far this year to 63 - a rate of more than two deaths for each day of 2006.
Locals in the Inishowen Peninsula in north east Donegal said more than 20 people have been killed in the region in the past two years.
Three men and two women in their early 20s also died in a two-car smash at Muff, near Buncrana last October.
