By Gordon Deegan
An inquest has heard that an 85-year old nun died from injuries after her car crossed the white line and crashed into a farmer’s oncoming JCB tractor on a west Clare road.
At the Clare coroner’s court an eye-witness, Nuala Hayes told the inquest in a deposition how she was driving behind Sister Cecilia Keating’s grey Kia Picanto car and started beeping the horn and flashing lights “as I knew there was something wrong” when she saw the car on the wrong side of the road.
At around 4pm on March 7, 2023 Hayes was driving towards the seaside resort of Kilkee from her parent’s home in Cross on the Loop Head peninsula.
She said: “I continued beeping and flashing and the car came back onto the left hand side of the road.”
Hayes said that after Sr. Cecilia’s car went around a bend, the car started to move back onto the wrong hand side of the road.
She added that the car then crossed a white line and the front right side of the car collided with the front right wheel of an oncoming yellow JCB tractor.
Hayes stated that the JCB tractor “was either stationary or moving very slowly”.
She said: “It was not coming at any speed towards us and as the car hit the tyre of the tractor it bounced back towards the ditch.”
Inquest
Hayes stopped and got out of her own car and said that she saw an unresponsive female in the Picanto car.
“I was talking to the driver and said ‘we are here, don’t worry’ but I knew she was gone,” she told the inquest.
At the time of her death in March 2023, Sr. Cecilia was living at Castletroy in Limerick and had served as a nun for 50 years in Australia.
In his deposition, farmer and contractor, Christopher Keane (50) of Bella, Kilkee told how he could see Sr. Cecilia’s car “weaving on the road”.
The driver of the JCD tractor said: “I slowed my vehicle and started to mount the ditch.”
Keane said: “I was in the ditch as far as I could go but I knew that the car was going to collide with my vehicle”.
He added that before he saw the grey car approaching, he was moving “at a maximum speed of 15km per hour as I was driving on the road”.
Nephew
At Sr. Cecilia Keating’s inquest, her nephew, Bernard Keating praised Keane’s ‘great thinking’ in lifting the tractor’s shovel by three feet before impact.
Keating stated that if Keane had not raised the shovel, his aunt “would have been destroyed”.
At the scene post accident, Keane passed a roadside breath test administered by Gardai.
Keating was one of the first people on the scene and when he went to see the condition of the person in the car, he saw that it was his aunt, Sr. Cecilia and that she was unresponsive.
He said that earlier that day that he “spoke with Cecilia Keating at my mother’s house in Kilbaha for about 45 minutes at around mid-day”.
Keating said that the family had questions over what happened to Sr. Cecilia in the stretch of road before impact.
He said: “Something happened in the last mile…she was very careful, she wasn’t a fast driver. She was 85 but looked only 72 or 73 – she was very fresh for her age mentally and physically.”
He said: “She was a lovely lady.”
Coroner
Clare County Coroner, Isobel O’Dea, stated that there was no evidence that Sr. Cecilia had suffered a cardiac incident or a stroke prior to impact.
She said: “It might have been a lapse of concentration.”
The coroner also stated that the Garda collision report detected no speed by Sr. Cecilia and the report had found that there were also no braking marks before impact.
The report noted that the JCB had moved onto the grass and margin and at the point where the vehicles collided, there was enough space for the Picanto to pass if vehicles were passing at low speed.
The collision report found that the JCB had forward movement while the Kia had considerable forward momentum at the time of collision.
The coroner stated that the post mortem concluded that Sr. Cecilia died from poly trauma as a result of a road traffic accident.