A councillor has called for a ban on people filming road crashes after his wife learnt he had been in one from social media.
Malachy Quinn of the SDLP said he had been driving towards a meeting of Mid-Ulster Council when he was involved in a crash.
While he considers himself lucky in comparison to other people involved in road accidents, he was upset by what happened afterwards.
“I was coming out of Coalisland,” he recalled on Newstalk Breakfast.
“There was a queue of traffic because the bridge in front of us was blocked by machinery.
“It came to a stop, as you would, and maybe a minute later, someone came screaming into the back of me and smashed the back of the car.”
Cllr Quinn describes this as “very unfortunate” and got out to inspect the damage and talk to the other driver.
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“About four, five minutes after that, I get a phone call from my wife asking had I been in the accident and what was going on,” he continued.
“Quite frankly, I looked around very puzzled thinking, ‘Is she in the queue of traffic? How did she know?’”
His wife told him she had seen pictures of the crash “all over social media”.
“She knew it was our car and wanted to know if I was alright,” he said.
Cllr Quinn believes strongly it should be made illegal to take pictures of fatal car accidents.
In Mid-Ulster Council, he has backed a motion in support of ‘Caoimhe’s Law’, named after a 23 year old woman who died in a Tyrone crash in 2016.
Before all family members had been informed, news of Caoimhe O’Brien’s death had begun to spread online and the family had to quickly inform each other.
Caoimhe O'Brien. Picture by: Change.org.“In this day and age, people are now quicker to take out their phones to film a victim in a car crash than they are to dial 999,” Cllr Quinn said.
He added that the O’Brien family’s experience is “not an isolated case”.
“I’ve heard stories of people going off on their bikes to wake up to police and paramedics around them,” he said.
“But also someone standing with their phone filming them.”
Cllr Quinn warned people not to do this as once it is uploaded, traumatised families will come across the footage “time and time again”.
Main image: Cllr Malachy Quinn and a road crash. Pictures by: The SDLP and Liam McBurney/Alamy.
