Siege victim Carthy may have left house for cigarettes, says sister in book

ABBEYLARA siege victim John Carthy may have left his house to look for cigarettes when he was shot four times by armed garda officers, his sister says in a new book published yesterday.

The ERU team felt threatened by the manic depressive after he suddenly emerged from his house with his loaded shotgun after a 25-hour siege in April 2000.

The 27-year-old labourer and chain-smoker had already fired 30 shots — once hitting a garda car — during the tense stand-off in the Co Longford village.

The Barr Tribunal, which sat for 208 days and heard 169 witnesses, later ruled that Mr Carthy’s death should not have happened and called for non-lethal weapons to be deployed in armed siege situations.

But Mr Carthy’s sister Marie said: “He could have been coming out for cigarettes — he was a chain-smoker. Plus they told him I was up the road, so he could have been coming up to talk to me.”

She was speaking in a new book: Abbeylara — The Tragic Shooting of John Carty by journalist Regina Hennelly who covered daily sittings of the Barr Tribunal.

Marie, who is in the second year of a four-year counselling degree at NUI Maynooth, is also critical about the large garda presence at the siege scene.

“If they had just kept away and left him alone, he would have been fine,” she insisted.

She also feels hurt by how garda lawyers and witnesses described her brother during evidence at the inquiry.

“They tried to blacken his name by saying his only outlet was drinking and smoking. His memory has been tarnished,” she said.

Marie also spoke out at garda claims that she had been drinking when she arrived at the siege house after being driven in a patrol car from her home in Galway.

“Drinking was the last thing you’d be doing. I was never drunk in my life. And all that stuff that was printed in the papers. People that wouldn’t know me, they would probably believe it and I couldn’t blame them if they did,” she said.

Marie hopes to use her counselling degree to offer professional help to those suffering from depression.

The Carthy family has now begun High Court proceedings against the Garda Commissioner, the Justice Minister and the Attorney General.

The 744-page Barr Tribunal report, which cost €18 million, also said that local gardaí ‘probably’ assaulted Mr Carthy while he was being questioned about a separate incident.

Garda Commissioner Noel Conroy stoutly defended the ERU after the Barr Tribunal was published in July last year.

He said: “If you go back and look at what the ERU have been doing on behalf of the Irish people and the force generally during the terrorist campaign in his country, I can assure you all those people put their lives on the line time and time again.”