My first thought was that now the people who loved Brendan O'Donnell's victims have to go through it all again. Then I thought of the flawless dignity they have always displayed. Maybe there is a heaven. If there is, perhaps they will forgive me for saying I hope Brendan O'Donnell has found his mother there, and that he is folded in her loving arms.
The way - it seems from how their bodies lay - Imelda Riney cradled her son,
Liam, when Brendan O'Donnell put his gun to the child's little head and pulled the trigger.
You can see the killer re-creating, in murdering a three-year-old boy, what had happened to himself. That was the age he was when he lost his own mother, who was his protector, and with her whatever chance he had of a valued life. He lost her first to the depression that had overcome her after her marriage.
Brendan's sister told the court of the mother, for example, holding eggs in her hands in the kitchen, and them falling and smashing on the floor without her noticing. "She would sit for long periods staring into space," the sister said.
And "my father would make out that my mother was putting it on". When Brendan was two, his mother went into a psychiatric hospital for three months. She came out again for two days - just long enough for it to seem to a child that she had come home. Then she had to go back to hospital again for four months. And so it went.
We don't know exactly how old Brendan was when he witnessed - to take one example of the domestic brutality detailed in his sister's heartbreaking testimony - his father smashing his mother in the mouth breaking her teeth. "She went to jump out of the car, and Brendan said `Oh, please mammy, don't jump'."
But we know that his mother showed a special care for him, coaxing him to school and even "sitting into the bench with him", his sister said, "until he was happy to let her go. She would then be standing outside in the corridor. As long as he knew she was there, he was okay. . .".
And we know that she went to hospital again, and didn't ever come back, and he lost his mother for ever. "He was a lovely boy," his sister said. "He was fine in every way. A very attractive child." Until then. "She died suddenly and we didn't get to see her. Brendan never accepted it, he didn't want to. The last one to see her would have been Brendan, the night before she died. The weather was terrible, it was snowing, and he went up to the hospital with my father. The next time, down at the hospital, Brendan said to me: `She's not dead. She couldn't be. She's upstairs - I saw her last night'."
He refused to believe that the body in the morgue was hers. For years, even when he had become a savage teenager, he slept in the cemetery, on her grave.
Please God they are together again. Her sickness and death did not determine him. But who can doubt that what he saw when he was very young imprinted him deeply? If it was sheer chance that he took the life of God's representative on earth, and a loving mother, and a curly-headed boy such as he himself had been, it is a chance that resonates.
He knew his own mother tried to kill herself. He knew, and he murderously parodied, a woman and child's powerlessness, a man's violence. His sister said on oath that his father hated Brendan and beat him with "a poker or a hurley or anything that came to hand". The father wasn't to foresee it, but Brendan found his own superior hurley when he first found a gun.
There was a point in his young life, five years after his mother died, when the boy was living in a shed. May he meet in heaven, too, some day, the neighbour who took him into his family. "He was like a bullock that had been dragged out of a boghole," Mr Muggivan told the court. "He was in a shocking state." But a huge effort was made for him. And he made an effort. He - for what was apparently the last time - tried to be good. But Mrs Muggivan got sick and she had to go into hospital. "It had an awful effect on Brendan," Mr Muggivan said. "I knew I was losing him."
There will be no hospitals in heaven. People won't die. Imelda Riney with her glowing hair will be there, and Father Walsh will be there. The people who loved them on earth will know that they are healed.
And there will be two happy and innocent little boys there. Liam Riney won't be the only one. Brendan O'Donnell will be as he might have been.