Tragic cases force us to face under-reported murder-suicide
This year alone, Cork woman Eileen Murphy took her own life when she jumped off the 647-foot high Cliffs of Moher clutching her son Evan, 4. They both died.
Two months later, in April, Adrian and Ciara Dunne were found dead at their home in Monageer, Co Wexford, along with the bodies of their young children who had been smothered.
It emerged the parents had made funeral arrangements for themselves and their children with a local undertaker just days before gardaí discovered the bodies.
Then, in May, 26-year-old Catríona Innes suffocated her daughter, Katelyn, 7, before hanging herself at their home in Letterkenny, Co Donegal. In other cases, the culprit has committed murder, but fails in their attempt to take their own life.
Earlier this year, Patrick O’Dwyer, aged 21, of Shrohill, Ennistymon, Co Clare, was convicted of killing his sister Marguerite with diminished responsibility in 2004.
He stabbed her on multiple occasions before he went upstairs to his bedroom and tried to kill himself after writing “butcher boy” on his wall with his own blood.
A jury heard how he could not understand what came over him when he attacked his sister while she was watching television.
Two years later a funeral Mass in Dublin would hear about a woman who had been similarly overcome with emotion.
However, in February 2006, Mary Keegan succeeded in stabbing herself to death but not before she took the lives of her two sons, Glenn, 10, and Andrew, 6, at their house in Firhouse, Dublin 24.
This took place while her husband, Brian Keegan, was in America on a business trip.
Irish people abroad have also been caught up in tragic cases of murder- suicide.
In February, a 29-year-old Irish woman was found stabbed to death with her four-month-old baby daughter in a London apartment with the body of an Algerian man nearby. He was the baby’s father.
Last month, Thomas Reilly, 46, and originally from Ballyjamesduff, drowned his two young daughters in a bath at a house in New Jersey in the US.
He then climbed into the attic of the family’s three-storey home where he hanged himself.
The Irish Association of Suicidology said murder-suicide is more common than people think and has traditionally gone unreported.
