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”.