Amid reports of an increase in random attacks on young men, one couple speak out about the brutal killing of their son four years ago. Despite political promises, nothing seems to have changed, they tell Kitty Holland.
The attack that killed her son lasted less than five minutes. But when her daughter, Sandra, took a call from Cork University Hospital, telling them Christian (27) had been beaten up in town, Marie Scully did not think it was "too serious". It was 3.30am, on a January Monday morning four years ago.
"I was getting up thinking it would be a broken leg," says Marie, a warm, chatty woman in her early 50s.
Sitting in the front room of the modest family home in a quiet estate in Togher, about three miles from Cork city centre, she and her husband Martin tell how two young men delivered repeated kicks to Christian's skull and face. He was left in a coma for nine months. He died of cardiac arrest on October 17th, 2002.
Christian's parents have not spoken to the media since their son died. "We couldn't at the time. What could we say?" asks Maria. When approached to do so last week, however, following the death of 22-year-old Liam McGowan, from Kinlough in Co Leitrim, they agreed.
McGowan died in the early hours of Tuesday last week at Beaumont Hospital in Dublin where he had been on a life-support machine since he was attacked four weeks ago. He was discovered lying on the street in Dublin's north inner city, unconscious at 2.15am on August 20th.
Marie and Martin Scully agreed to talk about the impact of Christian's death because "nothing has changed".
"The attacks keep going on," says Marie. "And every time I see it on the news all I can think is, 'There's another family, about to start it all'," she says, leaning forward and shaking her head.
Christian had been out with work friends on a Sunday night. At about 2.30am he told his friends he was going home and would get a taxi. He walked down Grand Parade to the rank.
"He went over the little footbridge near Barrack Street and he passed two boys," explains Martin. Sitting next to Marie, looking towards framed photographs of Christian on the mantelpiece, he tells how the family later learnt these two young men had earlier tried to get into a nightclub.
"One couldn't get in because he had a tracksuit on. The other went in and saw his girlfriend with someone else and came out. His friend was angry with him for going in without him, and he was angry with the girlfriend. He said in court he was 'twisted' and 'Whoever was there was going to get it'."
"One passed Christian," continues Marie, "and started a fight with him. Then he called the other friend back who put his legs in around Christian's and tripped him to the ground. The rest of the details came out in court. I'm not going any further here. We got every detail in court."
The two who murdered Christian were sentenced to life in May 2004. One of their statements, read out in court, said: "We just beat him to death. We just kept beating him. We used our fists and legs. We just kept hitting him and beating him, hitting and beating him and standing on him. When we lifted him up his face was like a tap - there was blood everywhere."
Marie thought she had been shown to the wrong patient when she was brought to Christian in intensive care. "There wasn't a mark on him from the neck down, but his face. He was unrecognisable."
With gentle poise, the couple detail the next nine months by their son's bedside. "I'd stay late into the night," says Martin. "And I was there during the days," nods Marie. "It was just part of what we did. It took over our lives but we wouldn't have done anything other than that. The only place I wanted to be was with him. My other four children were reared and he needed me. I'd hug and kiss him and chat to him and tell him: 'You're grand now Christian.' I think the nurses were in and out with him all night, too. His friends had a roster to make sure there was someone up every day to him."
During the World Cup that year his friends watched every Ireland match in his room, with him. "They were all fantastic," nods Martin.
Six months after he was attacked, Christian could be put in a wheelchair and, though still in a coma, his family would bring him out as often as possible for fresh air.
He was fed through his stomach and gradually, they explain, his body "folded up", as the "brain stopped sending the signals to his body". Marie gets up and returns with a photo of the once-handsome, dark-haired, smiling young man, taken in his hospital bed - his limbs twisted, contorted and turned in on themselves. His hands are doubled in at the wrists, his fingers curled. "By the end his knees were up at his chin, like a baby curled up."
In October that year, another late night call was taken, again by Sandra, again from the hospital, again telling them to come quickly. Christian had taken a turn for the worse.
"When we got to the hospital all the nurses were outside his room, crying hysterically," says Marie.
"We went down the corridor. I just looked to one of them and said: 'Is Christian dead?' "He is," she said. I just went in and put my arms around him and said 'Thank you my darling Christian for giving us this time to be with you, and I'm sorry if we kept you here too long'."
Cradling her six-week-old granddaughter, Kirsten, in her arms she says she feels more keenly since his death how important family is. She has four other grown children and five grandchildren. "All I want is to be with them. This one is named after Christian. I suppose it's come some sort of circle."
THOUGH GARDA FIGURES suggest assaults are going down slightly - from 4,738-recorded assaults in 2003, to 4,583 in 2004 and 4,374 in 2005, criminologists such as Ian O'Donnell of the School of Law at University College Dublin says it is "very difficult to get a handle on how much assault there really is".
"There is no doubt the number of lethal attacks - ie that kill - have increased over the past decade. But changes in the way the guards record 'non-lethal' assaults make measurement more difficult."
The CSO Crime and Victimisation surveys are more robust, having not been "filtered" by Garda measurement methods or whether people report to the Garda or not, he says.
Its last survey, in 2003, questioned 35,000 households, and found that 2.5 per cent - representing 75,600 people in the whole population - aged over 18 reported they had been the victim of either theft with violence or a physical assault within the previous 12 months. At least 5.1 per cent of young adults (18 to 24) - representing 23,400 - said they had been victims of a theft with violence or an assault.
In its commentary, the CSO said that survey showed a "sharp rise in the level of personal crime" since the preceding survey in 1998, with this type of crime doubling, from 2.4 per cent to 5.2 per cent of the population in the five years. While 61 per cent of people said in 1998 they had reported the crimes to the Garda, in 2003 that had fallen to 59.1 per cent.
O'Donnell puts the increase in violent crime down to a combination of factors, including huge social inequalities amid the economic boom, the fact that many of the young men perpetrating these crimes are no longer emigrating, and to the increased consumption of alcohol and drugs.
Eamon Brazil, consultant in emergency medicine at the Mater Hospital in Dublin, is in no doubt of the role played by alcohol. "About half of all the 130 or so injuries and assaults that come in every day are alcohol-related. Assaults are far more common at the weekend and we're busier with them after midnight. Over 50 per cent of them have alcohol involved."
About three assault victims on a weekend night will require intense observation and examination. "By far the majority of [people with] head injuries lose consciousness," he adds. Some will need scans and a small percentage must be transferred to Beaumont Hospital with its specialist skills in treating head injuries.
In 2002, when Christian died, the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern said there was "no denying" such attacks had become more prevalent. He said there would be more CCTV monitoring, more gardaí and that the excessive consumption of alcohol would be addressed.
The 2,000 extra gardaí promised in the programme for Government are expected to be on the beat by next year - three years behind schedule.
Last year the Department of Justice scheme to help communities install CCTV cameras was criticised for failing to provide enough information or time for groups to apply. Just 31 in Dublin applied - none from the city-centre.
As for alcohol, readers will be almost weary of the statistics: alcohol consumption here has doubled since the 1970s; alcohol-related illness has increased by two-thirds since 1996; the Irish drink almost twice the European average, at 15 litres of pure alcohol per person per year.
The official response? Earlier this month, five days after the President Mrs McAleese said excessive alcohol consumption fuelled "so many disasters", the Minister for Enterprise Micheál Martin rejected a call for a ban on the sale of cut-price alcohol in supermarkets.
"THINGS DEFINITELY aren't better than they were four years ago," says Martin Scully. "They said there would be a zero-tolerance approach to these attacks then. It hasn't happened. Society seems to have broken down; there is a lack of God in people today. There's a brutality which is becoming the norm, a lack of respect for humanity."
Asked about the ongoing impact of Christian's death, Marie says the family has got better at putting a brave face on things.
"If people ask now, I say I'm doing okay. People say you move on. But I don't want to move on - that would be letting go of Christian. We find the strength from somewhere, because life has to go on. We found great comfort in prayer, and we have great friends.
"People sometimes ask how many children I have," she adds, "and I say I have five, because I do - just one doesn't live with us any more."
