‘We will never return to this house’

A MOTHER whose home in Limerick city was attacked on Sunday — four weeks after her two children were badly burned outside the same house — last night pledged she would never again return to the family residence.

Sheila Murray handed Limerick City Council back the keys to her home in Pineview Gardens, in the troubled suburb of Moyross.

She is believed to be in Dublin, where her daughter Millie, six, and her son Gavin, four, are recovering in hospital from burns sustained in a fire bomb attack on September 10, outside the family home.

The children were sitting in the back of a car when petrol was poured onto the back seat, through an open window, and set alight. They are currently patients of Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin.

Two 17-year-old youths have been charged in relation to the arson attack. One is in custody, while the other has been released on bail.

Ms Murray was in the sitting room with a babysitter friend, at around 1.30am on Sunday, and four of her children were asleep upstairs, when bricks smashed though both the sitting room window, and the front door of the house. A car parked outside Ms Murray’s home was also damaged.

Limerick gardaí said yesterday they were following no definite line of inquiry into Sunday’s attack.

City housing officials, meanwhile, were trying to find suitable accommodation for Ms Murray and her family.

Councillor John Ryan (Lab) said: “She is now effectively homeless.”

He added that Ms Murray had almost completed a tenant purchase of her Pineview Gardens residence, before the attacks forced her to flee.

Ms Murray’s daughter Millie is due to be released from hospital in a couple of weeks’ time, and the family will need to be suitably accommodated before then, Mr Ryan added.

Leo McNamara, the children’s uncle, said: “When you see the two in the hospital, you have to ask how could somebody do it?”

Millie is coming on “leaps and bounds”, he added, and is able to walk around the corridors. Gavin is awake, talking, and out of intensive care, but still needs a lot of medical attention, he said.