'HSS' Baby Buried As Planned

A tragic postscript to this week's Stena HSS accident in Stranraer was the burial of the baby whose return to NI was briefly delayed because the ship couldn't dock.

It emerged yesterday that the coffin containing the baby son of Linda and Robert Megaw had to be taken from the stricken ferry during the night by rescue boat and then be driven by van to nearby Cairnryan by a Stena employee and ferried onward to Larne by P&O.

The child then arrived his parents' home in Portadown at around 8.30am yesterday morning.

Baby Cieran Megaw was then laid to rest as planned, while almost 200 passengers were still marooned onboard the Stena HSS Voyager.

Portadown parish priest Father Michael O'Dwyer thanked everyone who had co-operated in the sad task when he conducted the Requiem Mass, and sympathised with the family in St John the Baptist Roman Catholic Church yesterday afternoon.

Little Cieran died in a Glasgow hospital after contracting pneumonia on Christmas Day. He spent a week at Craigavon Area Hospital and the Royal Victoria in Belfast before being taken by air ambulance to Glasgow on New Year's Eve.

Since then, Linda and Robert conducted a bedside vigil, until Monday when Cierans died.

They travelled back home to make funeral arrangements, but a funeral directors who went to Scotland to make the arrangements and take Cieran's remains home - in a tiny white coffin - was initially stranded onboard.

(BMcC/JM)