A Tyrone woman who was named Charity Champion of the year at the recent Spirit of NI awards ceremony says she was “very emotional” to have received the accolade.
Marie O’Brien, from Douglas Bridge near Strabane, won the award for her work supporting families who have lost loved ones in road traffic collisions and for her campaign to make it illegal to share images, videos or details about a crash before a victim’s family have been notified of the incident.
Marie lost her own daughter Caoimhe, who was just 23, in a road traffic accident ten years ago.
It was that experience which motivated her to campaign for a change to the law.
“When we got the knock on the door at 1.50am I couldn’t speak to my son until the morning to tell him his sister had died,” Marie explains.
“But by 4 o’clock I was getting phone calls from her friends saying, ‘is it true, is Caoimhe dead?’…it was all over social media”.
“My only thought was if my son lifts his phone and sees it on social media, that’s going to be his last memory of his sister, because once you see it you can’t unsee it”.
While Marie did get to tell her son Christopher before he saw the news, she describes herself as “one of the lucky ones”.
Marie says that seeing footage of car crashes on social media is “horrendous” for families.
It has led her to campaigning for what has become known as ‘Caoimhe’s Law’ to be adopted across the island of Ireland, which would criminalise filming or distributing images or footage at the scene of a crash.
Road Victim Support Northern Ireland-Donegal, a charity which Marie is vice-chair of and helped establish, is the group leading the push for this change.
The organisation provides support and counselling to people who have lost loved ones in road traffic accidents, something which Marie says was not available to her following Caoimhe’s death.
“When I lost Caoimhe I was thinking I was the only person going through this”, she explains.
“There’s times you think you’re going crazy, and all you need is somebody who has been in your shoes who can say, ‘no, that’s quite normal’. If I had have had that it would have been so much easier for me to navigate the journey”.
Marie says she received “no support at all” following Caoimhe’s death, explaining that she would have been forced to wait over a year to receive counselling through the NHS.
“That’s why I want to be there for other people,” she explains.
Marie has also been involved in the campaign calling for the A5 road, which runs between Derry and Aughnacloy, to be upgraded.
It’s the most dangerous road in Northern Ireland, with more than fifty people having died on it in the past twenty years.
Plans to transform the road into a dual carriageway were first announced in 2007 but work has yet to begin, with the project suffering from funding and legal issues.
It was on this road in 2016 that Caoimhe lost her life.
Less than two weeks after her death, Marie’s brother-in-law was knocked down by a car on the same road, later dying from his injuries.
Having lost two family members in car accidents on the A5, Marie says the delays in upgrading it are impacting her personally.
“Every time there’s a fatal accident on the A5 I’m just sitting crying and trying to get my other daughter to make sure that it’s not her, because your first thought is ‘I lost Caoimhe, I could lose my other daughter as well’”, she explains.
Marie says that while the A5 is a dangerous road, people don’t think about “the tragedy they would leave behind if they did have an accident”.
She says too many people speed and believes the upgrades to the A5 “will never be done”.
Despite all of Marie’s charity work and campaigning, the nomination for a Spirit of NI award came as a complete surprise to her.
“I got a phone call to say that I was a finalist”, she explains.
“It shocked me that much I didn’t even tell my family!”
When Marie won the Charity Champion award, it came as even bigger surprise, because she didn’t even realise she had been nominated for that particular prize.
“The category that I thought I was in somebody else had won it”, she explains.
“I was chatting away and I looked up and said, ‘what’s my name doing up there on the screen?’”
Having realised that she had won, Marie says she was in complete “shock”.
The experience was particularly emotional because she had recently lost her mother.
“Mummy was a great fundraiser and campaigner for the charity,” Marie explains.
“I knew it was her pushing it all the way.”
While Marie says it was “amazing” to have been named Charity Champion, she emphasises that she hasn’t campaigned for Caoimhe’s Law and supported other people who have lost loved ones in road traffic accidents just to win an award.
She does it to try and prevent other people from having to experience what she has had to go through.
Marie urges people to think about the consequences of speeding and “leave ten minutes earlier” instead of rushing.
“You never want your mother and father to get the news that we got”.
