IRISH holidaymakers — estimates put about 700 in the affected region on St Stephen’s Day — appear to have been among the luckier ones, but they too have tales of terror to recount, writes Siobhan Maguire.

Bebhinn Leach, from Cork, and Brian Granaghan, from Dublin, were on a Christmas break in Koh Kradan in Thailand with Joe, their two-month old baby, when the tidal wave struck.

On St Stephen’s Day the couple, who are teachers in Phuket, decided to head back to Trang, on the mainland, because their accommodation on the island turned out to be sub-standard. The impromptu decision saved their lives.

“Five people were killed on the island as a result of the wave,” Leach said. “We had just left the longboat we were travelling in when we noticed people running and panicking on the roads. The sea had been very rough and I had to spend most of the journey crouched down with an umbrella over my baby because so much water was pouring in.

“As soon as we stepped on to the shore, the pier we had just stood on disappeared under water. We couldn’t figure out what was happening.”

Leach and Granaghan were reunited with their families last night. They have been living in Bangkok for two years, working with 20 foreign teachers, including two Irish men who are still missing.

“I consider ourselves to be very lucky,” she said. “There was a moment on the boat when I thought we wouldn’t make it. I couldn’t even find a life jacket to fit my son and had to try and put him into my jacket to protect him from the rough waters. Now that I know the extent of the devastation, I can only count our blessings.”

The tidal wave hit Sarah O’Leary’s beach bungalow on Phi Phi at 10am. “I heard screaming and looked out the window to see people being chased by water, fast water,” she wrote in an e-mail to her family and friends. “I called Mike (her boyfriend) and we started throwing stuff on the bed, but in that instant the water crashed through the door. We jumped on the bed and it started floating. The cupboard then crashed down and blocked the door. The room was filling up and I started to ask Mike if we were going to die. He started to try and kick the window open. He was naked and I just had a bikini on.

“The window smashed and he jumped out and on to a railing, and told me to jump, but my legs weren’t long enough, so I jumped into the water and struggled across. At this point the water started to recede to waist level.”

The couple scrambled to the top of a nearby hill, where they settled in for the night without supplies. The next morning they returned to their bungalow and managed to recover passports and credit cards.

They waited hours at a nearby pier for a boat, as rescue teams stacked bodies at their feet, mostly children and babies.

“The guilt of going home and surviving is huge,” said O’Leary. “We can’t taste food or stop watching the news. We don’t know if people we met along the way are dead or alive.”

Three Irish men have also been reunited with their families in Dublin after a miraculous escape from Phi Phi island. Graham Bird, 26, and Alan Kelly, 27, from Clontarf and Tom Walsh, 23, from Portmarnock, were swept into the sea after their beach hut was hit by the tidal wave.

“I didn’t know where the others were,” said Bird. “When I got as far as I could go to safety, I called out for them. I couldn’t believe it when they both answered.”

Dan Mulhall, the Irish ambassador in Malaysia, organised flights home for the trio.

Four other Irishmen will return home this week after they were evacuated from the Patong Beach area of Phuket. Richard Upton and P J Kinsella, both 23, and Nicholas Halley, 22, from Waterford, and Kenneth Wall, 24, from Tipperary, took refuge in a hotel when flood waters burst through the resort.

“I went to the shop and was on my way back to the hotel when I saw thousands of people running,” said Upton. “I had reached the hotel when I saw the water rushing towards us. Cars were being piled up on top of one another. People were being swept away and we saw others crushed by debris swept up in the floods.”

Tony Waters, 47, who runs Lek Murphy’s bar at Patong, said his pub became a shelter for Irish victims in the aftermath of the wave.

Waters, who has lived in Thailand for four years, visited hospitals to check for Irish tourists. “There were bodies everywhere. The hospital has set up a room which has photographs of 165 bodies, many of them foreigners.”

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