Never drink and drive - Killer drink driver jailed

NEARLY every family in this country has a tragic story to tell about how their world, their ordinary, contented lives were overturned by alcohol abuse.

A loved one was enslaved by addiction and lived a half life of pathetic self-destruction and heartbreak for those around them. Maybe a complete stranger visited disaster on them because they were drunk and out of control.

All of these tragedies leave a deep, often silent but never forgotten, mark because alcohol abuse is the blade that keeps reopening the great national scar. That sad reality was evident again yesterday when Finbarr O’Rourke, 40, of Portlaoise, Co Laois, was jailed for seven-and-a-half years for dangerous driving causing death. Ronan and Gillian Treacy the parents of O’Rourke’s victim, toddler Ciarán, expressed their anguish in a victim impact statement that Judge Keenan Johnson described as “one of the most powerful, harrowing, vivid and upsetting that I have ever read”.

The Treacys are not the first family to have to cope with such a loss but their plea that no-one drink and drive again might help reduce drink-driving deaths. If it does that then it is the silver lining in this very dark cloud. The depth of the tragedy was emphasised too when the judge described O’Rourke as “inherently a decent human being” who made very bad decisions. Another two families broken up because we cannot manage the monster in our midst.