A terrible symmetry in the life of a tragic triple killer

Brendan O'Donnell's life was destroyed as surely as he, in turn, destroyed the life of Liam Riney in the woods near Lough Derg…

Brendan O'Donnell's life was destroyed as surely as he, in turn, destroyed the life of Liam Riney in the woods near Lough Derg in the summer of 1994.

And O'Donnell's destruction began by all accounts when he was little older than the three-year-old he shot, for no apparent reason, and laid beside his mother's body in Cregg Wood.

It was part of a terrible symmetry of events and circumstance: as a boy often in trouble with his father, O'Donnell had gone to lie on his own mother's grave, a few miles away in Whitegate.

The tragedy bound Liam Riney's mother, Imelda, to her killer, too: she with her dream of the lake and the country around it, O'Donnell with his childhood memories of a place poisoned with violence and fear. And Father Joe Walsh, a man devoted to kinder ways, like Imelda Riney paid the price of trying to help where detention centres of one kind or another and prison had failed.

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It may be that by the time Imelda Riney and Father Joe Walsh arrived in that corner of east Clare and south Galway which stretches from Whitegate to Woodford, the part that O'Donnell bitterly called home, he was beyond reform.

At his trial, there was disagreement about his mental condition. The expert witnesses were evenly divided; only two of the 12 jurors favoured a finding of guilty but insane. He was found guilty of murder.

Art O'Connor, consultant psychiatrist at the Central Mental Hospital, summed up the question and the answer on RTE Radio's Morning Ireland yesterday. Was it a case of madness or badness?

"We are talking about badness," he said, pointing out that insanity was a legal concept: what had to be decided was whether someone knew what he was doing and whether he knew that it was wrong.

He also proposed a changed attitude to offenders: "In the past we've focused on the rights of offenders. This has recently shifted to the protection of others . . . In the past we have been too concerned with the rights of violent people." SO Brendan O'Donnell was sent to prison for life although, in his case, there was ample evidence of disturbance from an early age, as the jury heard at his trial and Tony Muggivan explained in an eloquent interview on Thursday's News at One.

He was five when he was taken to an assessment centre because he had told his mother about red worms coming out of his ears; soon after she died, he had begun going to sleep on her grave; he had started to take cars and guns when he was 12 or 13.

Mr Muggivan said O'Donnell was about 14 and on the run from Trinity House when he came to his home looking for food and a place to stay. He'd been living rough, in woods and sheds and old cars.

Mr Muggivan took him in for a while. So did others, but the Gardai were after him. And legal action seemed the only remedy.

As Mr Muggivan put it on radio: "I thought `there's something wrong, a child couldn't be treated like this' and I took a case to have him released from Trinity House."

The action failed. O'Donnell was to spend many years, as a teenager and as a young adult, in custody in Ireland and in Britain. But Mr Muggivan is convinced he was not given the help he needed.

"I'm disgusted, really disgusted," he said on Thursday. "There was ample opportunity over the years to help him and it wasn't done."

True. Given the conditions in which O'Donnell lived and the fact that he and his family failed to receive serious attention, an outsider could be forgiven for imagining that this was a tale of a backward place in the 1950s.

But Brendan O'Donnell was born in 1974. What happened to him happened for the most part in the 1980s and 1990s. Most of the institutions through which he passed are still going strong.

As several local community leaders acknowledged this week, he had nothing going for him - and that included the services which, in theory at least, were meant to ensure that such failures didn't happen.

We are used to confronting old failures: allowing problem cases to fall between agencies, putting them to one side in the hope that they'll eventually take care of themselves by emigrating or dying.

WE are all too familiar with local failures - of timidity or reluctance to interfere or an unwillingness to meet trouble halfway, the hope that someone else will do something.

Now, however, at the very moment of transition, when old certainties have been shaken and we need a set of values to replace those once imposed by a rigid, clerically dominated society, new voices are heard calling in harsher tones for a more callous order.

When Brendan O'Donnell terrorised his neighbours in Whitegate, the fear that spread to other parts of the country was conveyed with enthusiasm by some newspapers and some broadcasters for whom crime and fear had become an industry.

Reports of gangs roaming the countryside, robbing and attacking the old and vulnerable, filled the air. If it turned out that a crime was less dramatic than it first appeared, or of local significance only, too bad. The initial impression stood.

The result of O'Donnell's trial gave the crime industry a second opportunity to dramatise what he had done; his death was an unexpected bonus.

If Dr O'Connor sought support for his views, he would have found buckets of it in yesterday's editions of the Mirror, the Sun and the Star.

"May he rot in hell," screeched the Mirror. "Delight at triple murderer's death." The Star marked the "End of Sick Killer" - although as I understand it the court found that O'Donnell wasn't sick. And the Sun reported the "Riddle of the devil killer's death."

The souped-up reactions of these newspapers are at odds with the views expressed by some of those whose families were directly affected by O'Donnell's violence; but then it's not too difficult to find opinions that are more humane than the commentators who claim the common touch.

Father Joe Walsh's sister Margaret Maher told simply how she cried with relief when she heard the news of O'Donnell's death. (She called him Brendan).

But there was no sense of vengeance in her comments on the events of May, 1994. She remembered how Brendan looked in the court and how, if he were dressed in collar and tie, you might pass him in the street.