The night of 30 July 2025 is burned into Ailbhe O’Brien’s memory like a scar that will never fade. She was twenty, laughing in the back seat of a silver Volkswagen Golf, heading home from a day at the beach with friends she had known since national school. Ninety seconds later, four of them were dead, one was dying, and Ailbhe was the only one who walked away.

For four months she said nothing. Not to the guards, not to the newspapers, not even to her mother. She locked the story behind her teeth and tried to pretend the world hadn’t ended on a quiet stretch of the R132 outside Termonfeckin, Co. Louth.

Tonight, for the first time, the sole survivor of Ireland’s deadliest single-vehicle crash in a decade is ready to speak.

“I owe it to them,” she says, voice barely above a whisper. “If staying silent was protecting their memory, I was wrong. They deserve the truth, not hush.”

It was just after 11:15 p.m. The five friends (Ailbhe, her boyfriend Cillian Murphy (21), twins Lauren and Nicole Sheridan (both 20), and driver Adam McGovern (22)) were singing along to Dermot Kennedy at full volume. The road was dry, the sky clear, the speedometer nudging 120 km/h on a road signed for 80.

Adam wasn’t drunk. Toxicology reports later confirmed that. He wasn’t on his phone either; the device was found in the centre console, screen cracked but untouched for the previous seventeen minutes. What nobody saw (what nobody could have seen) was the sudden burst tyre on the rear left wheel.

Dash-cam footage recovered from a passing lorry shows the Golf veer violently right, then over-correct left. The car clipped the grass verge, flipped, and rolled four times before slamming roof-first into an ancient oak tree that locals call the Hanging Beech. The impact was so ferocious that the engine was thrown thirty metres into a field.

Cillian, sitting directly behind the driver, was killed instantly. Lauren and Nicole, squeezed together in the middle back seat without seatbelts, died side-by-side from massive internal trauma. Adam was partially ejected through the windscreen and pronounced dead at the scene.

Ailbhe remembers everything.

“I unbuckled myself before we even hit the tree,” she says, eyes fixed on a spot somewhere past my shoulder. “I don’t know why. Instinct, maybe. The roof was caving in and I could hear Nicole’s hand reaching for Lauren’s but never quite getting there. Then the world went black.”

She woke upside down, suspended by her seatbelt, petrol dripping onto her face. The radio was still playing, Dermot Kennedy’s voice eerily calm above the hiss of the dying engine.

“I crawled out through the back window. There was glass everywhere and the smell… God, the smell of blood and hot metal. I tried to pull Lauren out but her legs were pinned and she wasn’t breathing anymore. I knew it straight away. Her eyes were open, looking straight at me, like she was asking why I was still alive and she wasn’t.”

Emergency services arrived within nine minutes, but for Ailbhe it felt like hours. She sat on the verge cradling Nicole’s head in her lap, singing the lullaby their mam used to sing to them when they were small, even though Nicole had already gone cold.

In the weeks that followed, grief turned into something darker. Anonymous messages flooded her Instagram calling her “the girl who lived” and worse (accusing her of distracting Adam, of surviving because she was thinner, lighter, “less worthy of saving”). Strangers set up fake memorial pages claiming the crash was her fault. One TikTok with 3.2 million views used slowed-down footage of the wreckage while a voiceover whispered, “Only one walked away… coincidence?”

“I stopped leaving the house,” she admits. “I’d hear a car backfire and I’d be back on that road, smelling diesel and hearing Lauren scream. My mother found me once trying to scrub blood off my arms that wasn’t there anymore.”

The turning point came three weeks ago, when she visited the Hanging Beech for the first time since the crash. Five small wooden crosses had been placed at its base, along with faded flowers and handwritten letters. One note, in childish writing, read: “I miss you Adam. School isn’t the same.”

“That was it,” Ailbhe says, voice cracking. “I realised hiding wasn’t honouring them. They were the brightest people I’ve ever known. Cillian wanted to be an architect. Lauren was going to study marine biology because she loved dolphins more than people. Nicole could make anyone laugh within ten seconds. Adam… Adam was the safest driver any of us knew. He wasn’t reckless. He was just twenty-two and a tyre blew.”

She has a message for every driver who thinks “it won’t happen to me.”

“Seatbelts. Every single time. Nicole and Lauren always said ‘it’s only ten minutes down the road’. Ten minutes was all it took. And check your bloody tyres. Adam had no idea that back left was bald. A €40 replacement could have saved four lives.”

Ailbhe still flinches at sudden loud noises. She hasn’t been in a car since July. She sleeps with the light on because the dark brings flashbacks of those star-filled skies above the wreckage, beautiful and cruel. But she is determined to turn her survival into something meaningful.

Next summer she plans to tour secondary schools across Ireland with a simple talk titled “Five Seats, Four Crosses.” She will show the dash-cam footage (something no news outlet has aired in full) and tell them exactly what it feels like to hold your dying best friend while the radio keeps playing.

“People need to be shaken awake,” she says. “I don’t want pity. I want change. I want the next group of twenty-year-olds singing in a car on the way home from the beach to make it all the way home.”

As we finish talking, the winter sun is setting over Drogheda. Ailbhe pulls her coat tighter and looks toward the main road.

“Sometimes,” she says quietly, “when the wind blows a certain way through the trees here, I swear I can still hear them laughing in the back seat. And for a second, everything’s okay again. Then I remember I’m the only one who gets to hear it.”

She wipes her eyes, stands up straighter, and walks toward the bus stop.

Four crosses remain at the Hanging Beech tonight. But for the first time in four months, the fifth seat (the one that lived) has found its voice.