Toll grows as murder-suicide comes out of shadows

IRISH society is having to face a growing litany of parents who murder their own children before deciding to escape this life by suicide themselves.

And the Irish Association of Suicidology said murder-suicide is more common than people think and has traditionally gone unreported.

One of the first such tragedies known to have occurred was in Co Wexford in September 2000 when Kilkenny father Stephen Byrne, 41, drove the family car off a pier in Duncannon, drowning himself and his two sons, Alan, 10, and Shane, 6.

His wife, Maeve, 35, was later found stabbed to death at the family home at Cuffsgrange, Co Kilkenny.

In November 2004, Patrick O’Dwyer killed his sister, Marguerite, 17, in the family home in Ennistymon, Co Clare. He was 19 years old at the time and had tried to kill himself afterwards after writing “butcher boy” on his wall with his own blood.

He was convicted of manslaughter with diminished responsibility in June last year and sentenced to six years in prison, backdated to November 2004.

And in April 2005, mother-of-three Sharon Grace, who was estranged from her husband, drowned herself and daughters, Abby, 3, and Mikahla, 4, off Kaat’s Strand, near Wexford town after calling to a hospital looking for a social worker and emergency numbers for out-of-hours services.

In February 2006, Mary Keegan stabbed herself to death after taking the lives of her two sons, Glenn, 10, and Andrew, 6, at their home in Firhouse, Dublin. Her husband, Brian Keegan, was in the US on a business trip.

In January 2007, Cork woman Eileen Murphy took her own life and that of her son, Evan, 4, when she jumped off the Cliffs of Moher in Co Clare clutching her child.

In February 2007, Margaret Ward, 29, was found stabbed to death with her four-month-old daughter, Elleono, in a London apartment with the body of an Algerian man, Leon Barrett, nearby. He was the baby’s father.

In April 2007, Adrian Dunne, 29, his wife, Ciara, 26, and their two children, Leanne, 5, and Shania, 3, were found dead in their home at Monageer, near Enniscorthy, Co Wexford.

The parents had made funeral arrangements for themselves and their children with a local undertaker just days before the gardaí discovered the bodies.

The father, who was registered as blind, smothered his daughters and strangled his wife before hanging himself.

In May 2007, Caitriona Innes, 26, suffocated her daughter, Caitlin, 7, before hanging herself at their home in Letterkenny, Co Donegal.

In June 2007, Thomas Reilly, 4, originally from Ballyjamesduff, Co Cavan, drowned his two daughters Meghan, 6, and Kelly, 5.

In July 2007, metal sculptor, Pat Sleator, 42, shot dead his mother, Mary, 82, and father John-Joe, 84, in the two-storey house in which they had lived, just outside Grangecon in Co Wicklow.

In November 2007 Arthur McElhill, 39, his partner Lorraine McGovern, 30, and their five children — Caroline, 13, Sean, 7, Bellina, 4, toddler Clodagh and baby James — died together when fire engulfed their three-bedroom end-of-terrace house.

Police suspect the father, a convicted sex offender, started the fire.