Mother tells of living torment for Millie and Gavin

LIFE is taking an agonising toll on the life of a Limerick woman whose two children were badly burned in a petrol bomb attack.

Sheila Murray opened her heart yesterday on the living torment she and her children face every day nearly two years after the outrage that left her children, Millie and Gavin, with grotesque burn injuries.

Ms Murray, 37, has been admitted to hospital twice recently suffering from exhaustion and stress but signed herself out on both occasions.

She said: “I collapsed while shopping and an ambulance had to bring me to hospital. It was the second time I was brought in with total stress and exhaustion. Doctors wanted me to stay overnight both times, but I couldn’t as there would be nobody at home and I signed myself out.”

Her children, Millie, 8, and Gavin, 6, received horrific burns when the family car was petrol bombed on September 10, 2006 near the family home at Pineview Gardens, Moyross.

Millie underwent her fourth skin graft operation in July at Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin. She returns to hospital next Friday to see how the new graft is taking.

Ms Murray told yesterday of the living torment she and her children live with: “I meet people on the street and they say to me: ‘The kids are doing great.’ I say to myself they should come to my house and see how it really is. Gavin still wakes up screaming in the middle of the night... He is still in fear every time he is in the car... He sits behind my seat and says: ‘Mam, if the car gets burned again you will get me out first this time.’

“People don’t realise the half of what has been done to our family. I take them down to the clinic every day in Ballynanty to get their creams. This is my life and the only life my kids know, running and racing around waiting for their next operations... We have no life and cannot do anything as a family any more. Next Friday I have to take Millie back to hospital in Dublin and I don’t know if she will have to stay in as they want to see how her recent skin graft has gone. ”

She has three other children — Nicola, 13, Jason, 10, and Dylon, 3.

Three youths were jailed at Limerick Circuit Court last October for the attack.

Jonathan O’Donoghue, aged 18, from Moyross, who organised the attack, got six years; Robert Sheehan, aged 17, also from Moyross, who acted as look-out, got two years; and John Mitchell, aged 18, a neighbour of the Murrays, got five years.