The shooting of father-of-two Robert Delany 18 months ago has left him in a permanent vegetative state, and his shattered family are determined to get justice, writes CONOR LALLY, Crime Correspondent
NOELEEN DELANY can’t bring herself to think of the future. She is too frightened to consider what it might hold for her family. Her mind is already racing, her heart broken, at the events of the past 18 months. Tomorrow can wait.
She sits in the kitchen of her neat home in Tallaght, west Dublin, and through her tears and cups of tea she does her best to articulate her grief and her love for her only son, Robert.
“We’ll never have our lives back,” she says. “But I’m not giving up on him. I will be there 100 per cent with my son, no matter who else fades away.”
Robert, a 29-year-old father of two girls, was shot at his home in Tallaght on the morning of Wednesday, October 22nd 2008. He walked out on to the balcony of his apartment on Russell Rise, off Fortunestown Way, to investigate who was ringing his doorbell at 6.30am. A masked man armed with a shotgun fired a shot from the ground up at him. Robert was sprayed in the face with the shotgun blast and fell back into the apartment where his partner, Mags, and the couple’s two children – Megan (aged eight) and Katie (three) – were sleeping.
Gardaí believe the popular postman was shot because he had beaten off men – one of whom was associated with a former IRA member – as they attacked another man outside a Dublin pub in summer 2008. At first Robert received threatening phone calls. Then he was told he would have to pay compensation to the man he hit. When he was unable to find the money the young Dubliner, who had never been involved in crime, was shot.
Pellets from the shotgun blast lodged in his brain. He was rushed to Tallaght Hospital, where the Delany family were told Robert was most likely about to die.
But he struggled through. Today, 18 months after “it happened”, the once doting father lies in a hospital bed in need of 24-hour care. He is in a permanent vegetative state, unaware of his surroundings and unable to communicate in any way. He is the only gun crime victim in Ireland in that condition.
His brain is effectively dead, save for those parts that command the basic physical functions needed to sustain life within his otherwise healthy body. “They call it ‘the living death’,” his father, Terry, says. “There’s no response from him, nor will there be. We have to endure this. Robert is beyond help from anybody other than God.”
He says well-meaning people come to him with news of television programmes they have just seen of people waking from comas after 15 to 20 years. “But Robert isn’t in a coma,” Terry says. “He’s not going to wake up.”
Other people, he adds, are under the impression that the family simply can’t find it within themselves to switch off the life-support machine. “He’s not on a machine, never was. He’s lying in bed. You’d think he was asleep, hooked up to a feeding tube. He could live like that for 25 years.”
Terry, the deputy general secretary of the Communications Workers Union, outlines some of the horror his son has been through since being shot. He’s had bones removed from his skull to enable his brain to bleed and swell without the pressure killing him. There followed bouts of MRSA and spells of life-threatening heart palpitations. Robert lost his sight when shot and then developed epilepsy. “It’s horrendous to witness somebody you love in that condition and not being able to help them,” Terry says.
NOELEEN REMEMBERS A TIME when the Delanys were all happy. She recalls a tight-knit family as her two children, Robert and his older sister, Sinead (32), were growing up. “He adored her,” Noeleen says.
Throughout his teenage years a love of horses gave way to a passion for basketball, soccer and the gym. “He was shy, but at the same time has always had a great sense of humour, laughing and joking with his girls, us, his grandparents.”
Robert met Mags in his late teens and they had Megan and Katie. A painter by trade, he set up his own painting and decorating business. When the construction downturn came he took a job as a postman. He had been working at that less than five months when he was shot.
To begin with, says Terry, Robert’s room in Tallaght Hospital, and later Beaumont, was coming down with visitors. “But 18 months on you have to be realistic,” he says. “People have to get on with their lives.”
Noeleen had to stop her 81-year-old mother going to see Robert. “When she goes up to him she cries and cries for weeks after.”
Now the family occasions that would have been filled with joy are dates for which the Delanys have to rally themselves mentally to get through. When Robert’s sister got married in Spain last June, it was “the hardest day”, according to Noeleen. And Sinead’s 32nd birthday fell last week.
“We all went up to the hospital to celebrate it because we don’t have a normal life any more; it’s a roster around the hospital,” Noeleen says.
Next month Robert and Mags’s daughter, Megan, will make her first communion. “It will be a hard day, but we will make it special for her,” says Noeleen.
Since the start of last month Robert has been in the National Rehabilitation Centre in Dún Laoghaire. He is on the Smart programme, which assesses for substantive brain activity. None has been found.
Noeleen used to give Robert facials and stroke his face and arms as she spoke to him in hospital. Sometimes Terry would shave him. But they have now been told that too much stimulation will distress Robert because his brain function is so impaired. So even their basic need to touch their son must be held in check.
He will leave Dún Laoghaire and return to Tallaght Hospital in three weeks. Beyond that, the future is uncertain.
Terry says the family will continue its Justice for Robert Delany campaign, which it is hoped will encourage anybody with information on Robert's attackers to go to gardaí. The campaign has held a public meeting in Tallaght attended by more than 200 people. It has also done leaflet drops to more than 10,000 houses, met Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern and featured twice on RTÉ1's Crimecallprogramme.
Terry views three arrests in recent weeks as a sign that gardaí are still working on the case, even if the suspects were released without charge. He says prominent figures within the Republican movement, including Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, have condemned the attack on Robert and have effectively dissociated themselves from the former IRA member suspected of organising the shooting. Adams has visited Robert in hospital.
But Terry is realistic about any benefit of having such prominent Republicans publicly condemn his son’s shooting. “People are just too afraid to help the guards because they think the IRA had something to do with it,” he says.
Beyond trying to generate the publicity that may ensure the case remains a Garda priority, there is little Terry Delany can do. “You can’t grieve, because he’s there. Then you think: ‘Jesus, if he was dead would it be worse or not?’ You just don’t know.”
Noeleen despairs at the thought of her two granddaughters being left without a father. “I don’t know whether Katie will remember him,” she says.
She sometimes becomes angry with Robert for getting involved in the incident that led to his shooting. She constantly asks herself why her son didn’t confide in her and Terry that he was being threatened in the weeks before he was shot. They knew nothing of his situation until after he was shot.
“I’m not giving up on him,” she says. “There are times when I really sense he knows I’m there. I’m still hoping God will hear me, because I’m praying very hard for a miracle. And sometimes miracles do happen. I couldn’t imagine life without him.”
