Biography: The story of a troubled teenager who become a triple murderer poses important questions.
On the outskirts of many an Irish town there is a building whose windows open only a crack, which gives off sorrow. This is the mental hospital. Sometimes you see a person for whom that building is home come out and, hunched in against the walls, make their way down the town, whey-faced, in trousers that are too short, to buy cigarettes in little sweetshops for their shaky, nicotined fingers. Brendan O'Donnell might have found a home and sensitive treatment in one of those places and, if so, he might never have lived in such anguish, tested and tortured his community and finally murdered a young woman, a little boy and the priest, Father Walsh, who went into the woods with the by-now savage Brendan to bring the last rites to the bodies of Imelda and Liam Riney. That is the thesis of this sad little book.
One of the brothers who wrote it, Tony Muggivan, was a neighbour of Brendan's, and the Muggivan family took him in when he was 14 years old and living rough in a derelict shed in the freezing sleet and snow of February, starved and in a suicidal state. Almost the first thing Tony did - after consulting his brother, J.J., who is a clinical social worker in the United States - was to take Brendan to one of these mental hospitals. The two of them waited for many hours in the hope of getting Brendan admitted.
"We were put into a large room with about 12 men in it," writes Tony. "Brendan sat in a corner. I stayed standing, watching these 12 men who were all staring at us. A big man stood up and slowly made his way across the room towards me. He was over six feet tall and was looking at me very seriously. He put his hand on my arm, very gently, and asked me: 'Can I go home with you?' "
One doctor interviewed Brendan and said he must be admitted at once. For a brief while - an hour maybe - there was hope that the boy might receive from the psychiatric so-called service of this State the shelter and therapy that might in time have turned him into just such a poor old man: broken, certainly, but no trouble to anybody. But another doctor turned up and took the first one aside, and Brendan was turned away. And in the years that followed, during which the Muggivan family made heroic efforts to help Brendan - even fighting to foster him - he was regularly turned away by the institutions and individuals who make up the network of State care, funded by the taxpayer, to which an Irish family or community at the end of its tether can supposedly turn. Amateurs, however well-meaning, cannot handle a person as bizarre and cruel and wounded as Brendan became after his mother died when he was nine. Goodness doesn't do it; what is needed is a well-funded, honourable, hard-working, intelligent professionalism.
J.J. Muggivan, the second author of this book, adds a kind of clinical commentary to Tony Muggivan's homely and heartbreaking narrative. He clearly believes that there was a point when an informed therapeutic response to Brendan's growing violence would have been effective - he thinks the boy was probably neurologically damaged, and that the drug regimes he was put on from time to time made his condition worse. For all anyone can say, he's right. But this isn't the US; this is Ireland. At the end of Brendan O'Donnell's trial the then minister for health, Michael Noonan, ordered an inquiry into the way the psychiatric services had dealt with him. The inquiry was never carried out.
Inquiries into the treatment of such as Brendan have no urgency. And what, in any case, would an inquiry find? That the gatekeepers who saw no reason to take him on themselves came from the Ireland that accepted and still accepts the physical abuse of children in the home, that is still unsure that a child is worth saving from sexual abuse if the abuser is someone important, and that has no concept of emotional abuse? There was a priest in Brendan O'Donnell's locality who everyone knew was a child abuser; he fondled Brendan in public. Tony Muggivan and his wife, Mary, accidentally left Brendan alone for a moment with the priest and both heard him say: "I love you, Brendan." The glare turned on his hapless community by Brendan's lurid life illuminated other tragedies besides his own. Such as this priest's. Such as the tragedy of the local authorities who allowed the priest to flourish.
Actually, four people died, in this story from everyday Ireland. Brendan O'Donnell himself died at the age of 23, one day after he'd been administered 200 milligrams of a mind-stunning drug called Thoridazine and two days after he'd been adminstered 100 milligrams of it. This State does not keep a record of prisoners' prescriptions, but they are given a lot of drugs - drugs for Irish prisoners, apparently, cost four times more than drugs for English prisoners. It would ill become those of us who've never had to deal with a Brendan to criticise anyone who wanted him stunned. But if a population of murderers-become-zombies is the end result of a process that begins with bland reluctance to take in a difficult 14-year-old, it is not a process to be proud of.
The old man in the room in the asylum wanted to be taken home. But even with his personality almost extinguished by sedation, it is hard to imagine Brendan O'Donnell saying "take me home". Blame it on the psychiatric services if you like - Tony Muggivan has to find somewhere to put his enduring anger. But some tragedies that unfold in the intimacy of family relationships can only be prevented by the care the rich get, and even then they can't always be prevented. Better, perhaps, at least for the two of them, if it had been his own mother and Brendan himself who had been taken into the woods by a madman and shot - as he on some psychic level knew. Only we in Ireland would not then have had to face what this book asks us again to face. Think of the castes in our society that are looked down on. Then sink even lower to a group even less respected. You will arrive at the mentally ill poor.
A Tragedy Waiting to Happen: The Chaotic Life of Brendan O'Donnell by Tony and J.J. Muggivan Gill and Macmillan, 222pp. €10.99