Balcony Collapse Students Named

Balcony Collapse Students Named

Six students who died in the US after a balcony collapsed during a 21st birthday party have been named.

Several of them were from south Dublin and students at the city's University College Dublin.

They were named as Ashley Donohoe, 22, and Oliva Burke, Eoghan Culligan, Niccolai Schuster, Lorcan Miller and Eimear Walsh, who were all 21.

They were on a working holiday in Berkeley, California, on a summer visa scheme popular with Irish students.

Several other students were injured, some critically, in the incident on the fourth floor of an apartment complex in the college city in the early hours of this morning.

The balcony collapse saw the victims plunge about 40ft (12.2m) to the ground.

Some 700 Irish students are in the San Francisco Bay area for the summer.

The first relatives of those who died will arrive on the US west coast over the next few hours.

Philip Grant, consul general with the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs in the region, said there had been an overwhelming outpouring of support locally.

"For many of my countrymen it's a formative experience and to have this happen at the start of this season is something that has left us all frozen in shock and disbelief," he said.

"We are a very close, tight-knit group. Ireland is a small country and when you have the numbers that we had here today very few of us have been left untouched by this tragedy."

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