"I just feel devastated for Michael Senior, " said bookmaker PJ Rickard, a close friend of the White family, who lost their son Michael in the crash. "I feel guilty that my daughter's fine and his son is dead. I don't know what I'm going to say to him when I see him. What can you say?" There was, he said, a sense of guilt in the community.

Rickard's 13-year-old daughter Eimear was also on the bus that morning. She walked away from the crash, a little shaken up. "She left the house at the normal time of 8am, " her father said.

"She is always one of the first to be collected along the route. She took a seat in the middle of the bus where she always sits. Michael got on, and he was sitting up the front."

Eimear said there was nothing unusual about the journey. Nothing unusual about the weather. Nothing unusual about the road. The first sign that the bus was about to crash was a thump towards the back of the vehicle.

"She thought the back tyre went flat, that's what it felt like to her, " said Rickard.

Then the bus was overturned. Locals who were at the scene in the following few minutes believe that both Michael and the driver were catapulted out the front window, and that the bus landed on Michael.

"Eimear rang us straight away, and said that there were people injured and the bus had crashed, " said Rickard. "I was out there 10 minutes later. It looked like Beirut. The fire brigade and the ambulance men, and all the parents were parked up on the hill and looking down. I grabbed Eimear and I hugged her and I was just so thankful that my daughter was safe."

Michael White Snr stood at the crash scene for three hours, as all the other children were taken home, or to hospital.

He was one of the last at the scene, waiting for his son.

For three days, PJ Rickard didn't eat.

"I had the shakes, and I was dry retching and shivering and the whole lot, " he said.

"To be honest, I think the parents were worse than the children. The parents know what could have happened. When I was up at the graveyard, watching them dig a hole for Michael, I realised that if things were different, we'd have been digging 35 holes, and half the town would have been needed to do it."

Rickard didn't want to speculate about what caused the crash, or his feelings about the condition of the vehicle.

However, the Parents' Associations of Community and Comprehensive Schools (PACCS) yesterday called for a minister of state to be given overall responsiblity for school transport.

"Three weeks ago, a group of private bus operators approched PACCS and said that they were really worried that there was going to be another accident with a school bus, " said Jim Jackman, spokesman for the organisation.

"These are the drivers who are contracted by Bus Eireann to drive the majority of school buses. They want to put in seat belts. They're very anxious that the children would be safe. But the Department of Transport hasn't set down the guidelines for what type of seatbelts should be used or anything like that yet, so the bus operators don't want to spend money and then be told to redo it. They said another accident was just waiting to happen, but this is an awful way to be proven right."