An appalling waste of two lives

A KILLING, a garda siege, the besieged killer taking his own life — the sequence of events whose final tragic outcome was the pointless waste of two lives is a not unfamiliar drama.

This weekend the setting was Coolyhune, Co Carlow, and the victims were two farmers, but there have been other hapless tales, with elements of Coolyhune and a similar denouement.

Almost exactly four years ago, six-year-old Deirdre Crowley was murdered by her father, Christopher Crowley, who then took his own life, on August 30, 2001, at a house in Clonmel, Co Tipperary, where he had been in hiding with the child.

Crowley, aged 43, used a sawn-off shotgun to kill Deirdre, whom he had abducted from her mother in December 1999, before turning the gun on himself. However, the shootings happened after gardaí had called to the house on Colville Road, but had left to make further inquiries. They were visiting the house at the request of gardaí in Cork and were apparently unaware there was a serious threat to the life of the child. The Garda Commissioner subsequently ordered an internal inquiry into Garda actions preceding the killing of Deirdre to try and establish what happened in the chain of command preceding the shootings. There appeared to have been a serious breakdown in communication between the Garda divisions investigating the abduction of Deirdre.

Abbeylara, in Co Longford, was the scene of the country’s most infamous garda siege. It resulted in the death of John Carthy at his home in April 2000 after he confronted gardaí with a loaded shotgun.

Mr Carthy was shot four times from behind, by two members of the Garda Emergency Response Unit (ERU), as he walked in the direction of Abbeylara village carrying a shotgun loaded with a single cartridge. His death followed a 25-hour armed stand-off with gardaí during which Mr Carthy fired several shots from the window of his house.

The Barr Tribunal, set up to investigate the circumstances of his death, heard there were “significant errors in nearly every facet of this complex event”, particularly the garda failure to meet Mr Carthy’s requests for a solicitor and cigarettes, which the negotiator, Det Insp Jackson, had instead used as “bargaining chips” to pressurise him to end the siege.

The psychologist who had trained with the garda hostage negotiating team was not called to the siege.

The death by his own hand this weekend of 38-year-old farmer Michael Keogh, while under garda siege, and seven hours after he shot 30-year-old Jim Healy, will doubtless raise questions similar to those asked in relation to other sieges. Why was no trained negotiator at the scene given gardaí were alerted to the unfolding tragedy by the dead man’s brother, Brian, at 11am? Was a psychologist called? Who made the attempts to contact Mr Keogh? How did he get to the outhouse from where the gunblast that killed him was heard, if gardaí had his house surrounded? Why did an ambulance only arrive at the scene after he was dead? Were there medics present up to this point?

As with any tragedy, many questions remain unanswered but what is clear is it was an appalling waste of two lives over what local people agree was nothing more than a piece of land.