Rescue 116: Widow of pilot says support from Belmullet ‘helps with the trauma’

The widow of helicopter pilot Captain Mark Duffy who died in the Coast Guard Rescue 116 crash in March 2017 off the coast of Co Mayo has said she likes to return to Belmullet as she feels the presence of her late husband and his crew there.

Hermione Duffy, whose husband died alongside fellow crew members Captain Dara Fitzpatrick and winch crew Paul Ormsby and Ciarán Smith when their aircraft collided with Blackrock Island off the coast of Mayo in the early hours of March 14th, 2017, said some people might consider it a “traumatic place”. However, to her “there is a little bit of heaven” in Belmullet.

“Because of the huge support we got from that part of the world at the time of the accident, they welcome you back every time you go back. They want to see you. They say hello and are so lovely. That helps with the trauma. That all of that love is there. Belmullet is Mark and his crew. You can feel that that is where they are. Their presence is there.”

In an interview with the Brendan O’Connor show on RTÉ Radio 1, Ms Duffy said she met Mark in a rugby club in Dundalk, Co Louth, when she was 20 and he was seven years older.

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“A mutual friend of both of ours, Anthony, said to me, ‘Hermione somebody wants to meet you at the bar.’  I said, ‘Okay.’ I went around and went, ‘Oh, you are very nice.’ I was just finishing college and he decided he wanted to put in the effort to be a pilot. By the time we got married he was working in the private sector of helicopters. His dream was always to go to SAR [search and rescue] or fly a very big helicopter.”

Ms Duffy said all Mark ever wanted was to be a pilot and she knew that he was going to be good at it. Hermione owned a shoe shop after graduating from college. She became a stay-at-home parent when they had their two children, Esme and Fionn, as the SAR roster isn’t “conducive” to the routine of family life.

Ms Duffy said Mark was an incredible father.

“He was a great dad. Mark’s father died when he was 14. So when he had Fionn and Esme he really cherished being a dad with both of them. Because he did have the trauma of not having his dad when he was growing up.”

She said she and Mark were “joined at the hip” and were always out walking or cycling together.

“I was very lucky. We were very lucky to have that.”

[ Rescue 116: From responding to a call about a minor fishing accident to utter devastation ]

The couple had talked about what the worse-case scenario would involve in relation to his work.

“We had had that conversation quite close to the accident. Every so often we would talk about it. Mark said, ‘You are not to come to a site if an accident happens.’  He was protecting me. And he said, ‘Don’t bring the children either.’ He had that insight.

“He had the presence of mind to know that was not for us. We didn’t go in the early days of the accident, much as I wanted to. It was the right thing for us not to go down. And I think that is probably why I can go to Belmullet and feel a nice calm presence and aura when I am there. I don’t get tense.

“Mark was very perfunctory. Maybe it was the pilot in him. Checklists. And that is what you do. He said, ‘You have the skills Hermione. You will be fine. You will cope.’ It's a good conversation to have.”

Mark loved his work. Ms Duffy stressed that it was the “perfect role” for a “selfless” person like her husband.

She said SAR pilots normally retire at around 58 and the plan was Mark would set up a bicycle repair shop at that point.

[ Rescue 116 crew deaths were accidental, inquest jury rules ]

Ms Duffy wanted their children to “carry their grief as softly as possible”. She said she was informed of the incident at 5am on March 14th, when a member of the crew and two of Mark’s friends came to her door.

“It was bizarre. I thought Mark was sick. Because one of them had a car the same colour as Mark[’s] and I looked out the window and went, ‘Oh, Mark must be sick. They have brought him home from work.’ And then I opened the door and it was something completely different.

We knew then four hours later, we kind of knew where the helicopter was. In those first few hours my thoughts were, ‘Mark has done the dunker [underwater escape training]. He is going to get out. His life jacket is going to take him to the water. He is going to have a raft.’

“That was my safety net for those couple of hours. But it came around quite quickly [that] that wasn’t going to be the situation. About four or five hours later it was a search and recovery situation.

“I wasn’t acknowledging that Mark was dead at that point but I knew it was the next phase. I dragged that out a little bit longer. I had to keep it calm. It was for the children, which is what Mark would have done.”

Ms Duffy said the next phase was “getting Mark home”.

“Mark had always said if he was lost at sea that, ‘that would be okay, Hermione. You will have to sit with that as well if I don’t get home to you.’ That risk was there. I was prepared for that as well if we didn’t get Mark back and how we would cope. But we did get his body back.”

[ The Irish Times view of the Rescue 116 crash: Tragic and preventable ]

She paid tribute to her “army of friends and family” who have supported her since the death of Mark. Ms Duffy said becoming a widow at the age of 44 is the “loneliest, loneliest place”.

“In your head you have this parallel conversation going on with your spouse. You have your real life conversations and people are talking to you and caring for you. They are doing so much for you. And then I’m going, ‘I am so lonely. I want my Mark. Where is my Mark? I need to talk to him and tell him something.’”

Esme was 13 when her father died and Fionn was 11 years old.

“If they didn’t want to go to school they didn’t have to go to school. I took the pressure off them. If they wanted to eat a load of sweets they could eat a load of sweets. It was just ‘let it out.’

“Night time was probably the worst time, so I would probably be up at one or two in the morning talking to them; encouraging them to move with their peer group. Whether it was the first disco or whatever it was. To let them have their little lives. To keep going forward.”

Ms Duffy said she was blessed to have friends who allowed her to “be bawling crying”. She also talked to Mark and wrote countless notes in notebooks to him.

“There is notebooks all over the house with just thoughts in my head that I would write what I was thinking. The magical thinking goes on for a while until a point where I had to say, ‘Mark is not coming back.’

“He is in the conversation every other day. I want to keep it all soft and gentle for them [the kids] so they can cope in later years.”

Ms Duffy said she adores her children and Mark is “ever present with them”.

“We are a happy little family now. And we have lots of good positive things to move forward for and lots of happy thoughts to bring with us from their young childhood years.

“A widow has to allow themselves to move into another phase of life because there is the guilt and you don’t want to. You want to stay fixed in that place where you were.

“There is a point then when you say, ‘I am allowed to change my life,’ or, ‘My life is going to change because Mark is not here. The role that I had seen coming is not going to happen.’ So I have to let happiness and joy back into my life. That takes a long time. When you lose your spouse everybody will wish you the best. You just have to let yourself wish yourself that as well.”