Carl O'Brien Social Affairs Correspondent reports from Latvia, where the families of those killed in last week's car crash in Co Donegal are still coming to terms with their loss.
Ivars Veits is gripping a tattered handkerchief between his hands and fighting to hold back the tears. An old photograph album lies open on the coffee table. Newspaper clippings with pictures of two mangled cars are neatly arranged in a pile. All around the living room, framed photographs of his 19-year-old daughter, Ginta, and his former wife, Aija, peer out from the shelves.
Sitting on the edge of the couch in his cramped one-bedroom flat in Priekule, a town in the north-west of Latvia, the 44-year-old fishmonger says he is still trying to comprehend the enormity of last week's tragedy that unfolded almost 2,000km away on a narrow roadway on the Inishowen Peninsula in Co Donegal.
"There is no sense in life sometimes," says Ivars Veits, who found out just less than a week ago that his daughter and former wife had been killed in a horrific car crash that claimed the lives of five eastern Europeans.
"It was a terrible fate for them to die so far from home," he says in a strained voice. "I have never been to Ireland, but I feel that I need to go there now, to see how they lived, to feel the atmosphere they felt. I would like to work to pay to put up a small cross or sign at the sign of the road. I have nothing else to work for."
Aija Porcika (38) had just collected her daughter Ginta from Dublin airport and was returning to Buncrana with friends Marita Kerpe (28), a mother-of-two, and Ricardis Bielskis (35), when their white Volkswagen Vento was struck by an Audi saloon driven at high speed by a Latvian, Danielitis (also known as Daniels)Abartis (23). Some of them were killed immediately on impact, while two of the women were later pronounced dead at the local hospital.
The crash has devastated five sets of families in towns and villages across Latvia and Lithuania. In a bizarre coincidence, the mother and daughter were from the same region (near Priekule) as the driver of the oncoming car.
For many of the families, the tragedy has been underscored by the cruel irony that their loved ones had travelled to Ireland to earn money to eventually build better lives for themselves and their families at home.
Aija Porcika had been working in an electronics plant in Burnfoot, Co Donegal, and was earning money to help send her daughter Ginta to college at home.
Her friend Marita Kerpe had been working at Farren's supermarket in Buncrana to support her two children in Trikata, a rural area in the north-east of Latvia. She had been planning to return home for a visit next week.
Daniels Abartis had been saving money to buy an apartment in Latvia with his girlfriend, who was about to graduate from college. They were planning to start a family when he came home for good.
The death of Marita Kerpe has been devastating for dependants such as her children and grandparents, who had been relying on her income.
"She was sending money back to her husband, supporting us and paying the telephone bills made by her children," says her mother, Rasma Rakstina (68), breaking into tears. "Now the children are left without help, without assistance. We are ruined. All we have is debt, poverty and broken hearts," she says.
AT A FLOWER stall in the middle of Liepaja, a port town about 35km from Priekule, Baiba Cice (22) is trying to concentrate on work to distract her from the grief of losing her best friend, Ginta Veits.
"The hardest part is over, I hope. But I cannot face going to the funeral. I want to remember her the way she was, full of life and happiness. The burial would be too difficult. We were very, very close. I had two brothers, but no sister, and we used to call each other 'sister'." On the day before she left Latvia, Ginta had expressed some last-minute doubts to Baiba about heading to Ireland, where she planned to work for a few months with her mother.
"We were having a coffee, just down the road. She didn't really want to go. She had all her friends here, but she wanted to earn some money for her studies. She had been in Ireland before for a month and she liked it. I remember her saying that people there were very open. You could smile at a stranger and say hello and they respond. That wouldn't happen here," says Baiba.
"But she was also very homesick and missed her friends badly. Then, while we were having our coffee, her father rang and said he wouldn't be able to bring her to the airport (a three-hour drive away). I was kind of happy, because it meant she might stay, but a friend eventually agreed to drive her there . . . I would have travelled to Ireland with her, except that I have a two-year-old-child here."
When Ginta arrived in Dublin airport at 12.45am last Saturday morning she was met by her mother and friends. She sent a text message to her aunt at home: "My mother has met me at the airport - everything is okay."
Equally for the family of their friend Marita, the day before the crash there was nothing to suggest the horror that was to unfold in a few hours' time. Ginta's mother recalls Marita phoning home on Friday morning as usual to say she would transfer money into a bank account to pay for her child's kindergarten. She planned to call again on the next day in the afternoon.
At around 4am on Saturday morning, after a three- and-a-half hour drive from Dublin airport, the white Volkswagen Vento carrying Ginta, her mother and friends was approaching Buncrana.
At about the same time, a garda on public order duty in the town reported seeing a car with two male occupants driving erratically, which had failed to stop after striking a vehicle. Gardaí radioed to Burnfoot, around 10km away, to set up a checkpoint to stop the Audi saloon.
Daniels Abartis and a Latvian friend had been out in a nightclub in Buncrana. They had taken the car from the town clerk, Paul Doyle, who they were staying with. (Doyle later said it had been taken without his permission and he had previously asked Daniels not to drive the vehicle).
Ginta and her mother, meanwhile, were just minutes from their rented accommodation in Buncrana when, around a sharp bend, the Audi ploughed at high speed into their Volkswagen.
Daniels was killed almost instantly on impact. His 21-year-old Latvian colleague in the passenger seat was badly injured. In the other vehicle, Ricardis Bielskis and one of the women lay dead amid the wreckage. Two of the other women were taken to the local hospital but died a short time later.
Fr Con McLoughlin, a local priest who had been called to administer last rites at the roadside, said the scene along the roadside in the early hours of the morning was one of carnage.
"I've begun to dread the early morning phone calls because all of them have been tragic road accidents," he said. "The first of them, July 12 months ago, was three Latvians. Ever since, there has been a catalogue of accidents which has impacted badly on the community, especially the eastern European community, so many thousands of miles from home."
BY SATURDAY AFTERNOON word was beginning to filter through to authorities in Latvia that four nationals had been killed. One of the first in the Priekule area to find out about the deaths was Ruta Balode, the 65-year-old mayor of the municipality where Ginta, Aija and Daniels were from.
"Many of the young and educated people have been leaving for the cities or large towns. We do not have so many people who have emigrated to Ireland; it is mostly to the city. So it was a major shock to learn that an accident so far away could claim so many lives here."
The same afternoon Ivars Veits received a phone call from the mother of a policeman in the area to say there was an accident involving his family. But there were no further details.
"I didn't believe it at first. When I went to the police station the next morning, asking for official information, it was confirmed. I was devastated. I just felt that there is no sense in life. Why did it have to happen to them? My only daughter?" says Ivars, breaking into tears.
About 300km away in Trikata, at the house where Marita Kerpe's two children were being looked after by her grandparents, her brother Janis came rushing through the door. He had just run 5km from his house after hearing the news.
Marita's mother, Rasma Rakstina, recalls: "He came in, screaming 'We have lost our sister!' It was then that the nightmare started. It has been chaos since . . . She was gone, yet I had been speaking to her the day previously.
"She was really looking forward to seeing her children. When she called on the last occasion, she said 'I will be back on the 28th of February'. She had bought tickets on the internet. Now, her body will be coming back on the same day." Because now, the families are preparing for funerals due to take place early next week and seeking to come to terms with a tragedy that occurred in a foreign country few Latvians have visited.
Many relatives have expressed gratitude to Irish authorities, such as the Health Service Executive (HSE), which is paying for the repatriation of the bodies to Latvia, and to the wider Irish community for their messages of support.
THE GRIEF OF Ivars Veits is strained even further by the fact that he knows the family of Daniels Abartis, the young man who may have been responsible for the deaths.
"I know him, yes. I am the organiser of a local club and if there was a party organised and he was around, you know you are likely to have some problems. I have some anger towards him, but I do not want to speak ill of the dead," he says. "I know the parents, too, but it's not their fault. It's hard for them. They have lost a son. In some ways, it's even more difficult for them."
Ivars also recalls his daughter remarking about the level of drink driving in the Donegal area. "She was amazed at how common it was, mostly among foreign workers, and then they would go speeding along these narrow roads. She was surprised at the lax approach to the law. I warned her at the time never to go into a car with a drunk driver."
For Marita Kerpe's family, the grieving process is made worse by the uncertainty over how a family with so many dependants will survive. Neighbours have been dropping in groceries, such as bread and milk, this week. Others have lent them clothes to wear for the funeral. The next priority, says Marita's mother, is looking after the grandchildren.
"I have huge debts. And I will make more debt to support these children. But I will do it until the end of my days. These children are the biggest gift in my life now."
Meanwhile, Ginta Veits's best friend Baiba looks out across the market place in Liepaja from behind her flower stall and says she is finding it difficult to accept her best friend is gone.
"One of the hardest things is being so far away. I wanted to be with her when she died. Now I want to cry, to shout out loud, because this is all so terrible," she says. "I'm slowly realising that she is gone. We had a tradition of sending each other a text message in the evening. Sometimes I find myself about to pick up the phone and send her a message . . . but I can't."