The Coroner's Court: Gillian Vaughan's voice breaks as she describes the moments before the collision.
She sat in the passenger seat of her boyfriend's silver Audi that morning in August last year. They were travelling between Toonsbridge and Hartnett's Cross, she recalls, and were about two or three miles outside Macroom on the Cork side of town. It was 9.40am.
The morning was dry, visibility was good and there were no other cars to be seen on the straight stretch of the minor road. "I wouldn't think we were going too fast," she says, tears rolling down her cheeks.
Behind the wheel, Daniel Kelleher noticed a small blue van about to join the road some 80 to 100 yards ahead and, as he approached the junction, he noticed that the van's nose was jutting slightly into his path. "He was coming on to the road at the same side as me," says Mr Kelleher. "He was pulling out to come against me, I presume, from a side road. He was stopped, then he started to roll forward."
As the van nudged slowly forward, Mr Kelleher veered to the right to give it a wide berth. "But as I came close, he shot out quicker. He seemed to shoot out suddenly."
With the van now moving directly into his path, Mr Kelleher swerved to the left and tried to steer towards the ditch behind the van. "My last intention then was to go in behind him. I tried to go towards the ditch . . . but I don't think there's anything I could have done to avoid his car."
The impact was sudden and violent. A fraction of a second after Daniel Kelleher had swung to avert a head-on collision, the Audi struck the back and side of the van with an intense thump, projecting it into a 180-degree spin that was halted only by the ditch on the opposite side of the road.
The Audi surged forward another 50-100 yards before its occupants, pressed into their seats by the force of the airbags, could turn to one another and give thanks that neither was seriously injured. The road was still again.
Daniel Kelleher and Gillian Vaughan ran back to the van. They recognised its driver immediately. It was Peter Looney, an 88-year-old local man. He lay slumped against the driver's door, a gash on his forehead, unmoving. The van's engine was still running.
"I went over to the old man and he responded to me," says Ms Vaughan quietly. "He was lying up against the door, and I asked him if he was okay."
Within a few minutes, more cars had arrived. One man called for help. Another held Peter Looney by the hand and tried to keep him talking. He was conscious, but only barely.
Such was the damage to Peter Looney's van that it took the fire brigade crew between 15 and 20 minutes to remove him. He was brought to Cork University Hospital, but died there at 1.40pm that day, August 26th, 2005.
The inquest into Peter Looney's death at Cork City Coroner's Court heard that inspections of both vehicles showed them to have been in roadworthy condition. The side road from which Mr Looney was joining the main road that morning was the laneway that led to his home at Sleveen East.
According to Garda Patrick Nolan, who investigated the crash, Mr Looney had probably set out to make the familiar journey to some land he owned nearby. "I felt that he misjudged the distance of the Audi," Garda Nolan said.
At the inquest, the victim's son, Timothy Looney, and two other family members sat silently in the public gallery as Cork City Coroner, Dr Myra Cullinane, read a summary of the autopsy on Peter Looney's body.
It showed that he suffered fractures to the collarbone and to the ribs on his right side, as well as a broken spinal bone. He died of a haemorrhage, with these multiple fractures as well as bruising of the brain.
The autopsy showed no sign that he had had a stroke or a heart attack, Dr Cullinane noted. "One would hope that he didn't suffer to any great extent," she said, before offering her condolences to Mr Looney's family and her sympathy to Daniel Kelleher and Gillian Vaughan. The jury returned a verdict of accidental death.
• This is the beginning of a series on road deaths in the Coroner's Court which attempts to explain why they occur.