Irish students: There are no immediate plans to bring home the three UCD students caught up in the gun attack in Virginia, the mother of one of the students said yesterday.
Nicola Greene (20) from Ballinacoola near Gorey, Co Wexford, was in a college building close to where the first gun attack took place just after 7am.
"Classes went on as normal until about 10 o'clock," she told RTÉ Radio. "We were about to leave for 10 o'clock class and we got an e-mail to stay indoors, that there had been another shooting."
The e-mail told students: "Please stay put. A gunman is loose on campus. Stay in buildings until further notice. Stay away from all windows."
Nicola Greene's mother, Paula, told The Irish Timesthat her daughter's immediate friends were all safe. But at the time of talking she still did not know if any acquaintances were among the dead as all students had been confined indoors.
She said her daughter and the other two students were due home in mid-May after their exams and she had not heard of any plans to bring them home earlier. Her daughter appeared to be coping well: "Nicola is fine, she's always been a coper," she said. "She sent us a text earlier today and she did say that a lot of people were very traumatised this morning. The shock is only hitting them now, I suppose."
Nicola Greene and her two male fellow students are on an exchange programme between UCD and Virginia Tech. They are all third-year biosystems engineering students and arrived in Virginia as part of a scholarship programme last August. Virginia Tech generally accepts one student from the UCD course but the three students were felt to be of equal merit last year so they were all accepted.
A fourth Irish person, Nicholas Kiersey, a PhD student at Virginia Tech posted a message on the BBC website yesterday saying: "I just wanted to express my sorrow about this tragic and inexplicable event. It's hard to believe that events like this can happen in your own life, events that we can usually only ever view from a distance, on our TV sets.
"VT has been a wonderful school to me, as has the Blacksburg community. This tragedy, combined with the one just a few months ago, involving Will Morva (who I knew very well, actually) will leave the whole region devastated for a long time to come." Will Morva is expected to stand trial this autumn on charges in connection with the fatal shooting of a hospital security guard and a sheriff's deputy. He was arrested near the Virginia Tech campus last August.
Yesterday Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern said officials from the Irish Embassy in Washington would be providing whatever assistance was needed by the Irish students.
