The family of Mrs Nancy Nolan, the 80year-old Co Galway widow who was murdered by a man on temporary release from Castlerea Prison last February, is not satisfied with the response from the Minister for Justice to the circumstances surrounding the case.
"It seems that a life sentence doesn't mean anything," Mrs Eileen Glynn, Mrs Nolan's younger sister, told The Irish Times.
The Fine Gael Galway East TD, Mr Paul Connaughton, has also expressed dissatisfaction and has accused the Minister for Justice, Mr O'Donoghue, of "side-stepping the issue" by ordering a review of the circumstances surrounding the decision to approve day release for Thomas Murray - the 37-year-old man convicted of the crime earlier this month in the Central Criminal Court.
In addition, Mr Connaughton has expressed alarm at the Minister's confirmation in the Dail last week that 80 offenders who were committed on life sentences were on release in the community.
"The Nolan family need to know why this has happened. The public need to know," Mr Connaughton said.
The widowed schoolteacher, who would have been 81 last April, lived on her own near Ballygar on the Galway-Roscommon border, and was fit and independent.
She had taught Thomas Murray in Ballaghlea school. She was one of the few people who had spoken to him when he was on day release from Castlerea Prison in Co Roscommon, where he was serving a life sentence for the murder of William Mannion in 1982.
The following year, Murray was refused leave to appeal. Then in 1998, during one of his temporary releases, he was found guilty of exposing himself and was returned to custody with a six-month sentence.
"Nancy never really mentioned him, and certainly didn't indicate that she had any fear of him," Mrs Glynn, who lives in Ahascragh, Co Galway, some eight miles from her late sister's house, said last week. "She'd have felt it might help him if she spoke kindly to him. . . . But I know her neighbours were terrified of him. You could feel it at her funeral - as if they knew who might be responsible for this, but were afraid to say."
A widow herself, Mrs Glynn was one of five girls and five boys, originally from Castlerea. Only three of the 10 now survive, Mrs Nolan being the first to reach 80.
Her younger sister is still reliving the minutes, hours and days after her niece, Sheila, phoned to check if Nancy was staying with her. "I think I must have been the last member of the family to see her alive, when I left that Sunday night, February 13th." Two of Mrs Nolan's six grown-up children had stayed with their mother that weekend.
"Nancy liked to live her own life and didn't like being checked up on," Mrs Glynn says. "But if she was going to be away, she normally let us know. We thought that perhaps she had stopped off with her neighbours, the Fitzmaurices, who have been fantastic to us all since this happened."
Initially, Mrs Glynn was told her sister had been found dead in bed. "It was only later that day that the Garda informed us that they feared they would be investigating a murder. It was a horrible moment, and one that everybody still finds it hard to come to terms with."
Responding to a question tabled in the Dail last week by Deputy Connaughton, the Minister for Justice said that due to the "very serious consequences" in this instance and the very understandable level of public concern it had generated, he had ordered a review. He promised to make the results of the review available to the House and to Mrs Nolan's family, and said he would "consider carefully any recommendations" that emerged from it.
As the Minister outlined it, the criteria applied in the case of life-sentence prisoners includes assessment of potential risk to the public; the seriousness of the offence committed; behaviour while in prison; the views of the Garda Siochana; compassionate grounds; and recommendations by the Sentence Review Group - a non-statutory body established in 1989 to advise the minister on administration of long-term prison sentences.
Offenders on temporary release must be of good behaviour; must be supervised by the Probation and Welfare Service; and must report regularly to a Garda station. Currently, six life-sentence prisoners are back in custody, having been recommitted following their failure to abide by their release conditions, the Minister said. These offenders were initially released between October 1996 and January 2000.
