On Saturday March 6, our daughter and sister, Sinead, was critically injured in a gun attack in her home.
She is a single mum and was with her daughter when the attack took place. She was shot as she sat on her settee. Friends of her partner were also in the apartment at the time. One of them dragged the daughter out of view of the attacker while another immediately applied emergency first aid after the gunman had left. His prompt actions saved her life and gave her a fighting chance in hospital where, despite sustaining injuries that were critical, she is now recovering. We are eternally grateful.
We are deeply disheartened that some newspapers took it on themselves to run with wholly erroneous reports that the shooting was a result of an ongoing IRA feud and that there was an IRA gathering in the apartment at the time.
The only people in the apartment at the time were Sinead, her daughter, and her partner’s friends. Whatever political allegiances the friends had was not a factor in the attack.
The media outlets sought to hang their story on the history of our brother Sean who is currently in prison for IRA activity.
The attack is rooted in a long-standing local dispute. Sinead was shot by a person known to her. Despite press reports there is no link between it and Sean’s imprisonment.
Sean has called for calm and for no one, no matter how aggrieved they might feel, to even think about engaging in any sort of tit for tat. He is adamant that what happened to Sinead be visited on no other family. He insists that after many years of reflection he has come to the realisation that violence has no place in society and can never be a way to settle grievances or differences.
Sinead is a single parent, not a republican activist of any hue. Far from being the result of an IRA dispute the backdrop to the incident was a local culture of bullying.
That said, it is not our family’s intention to harbour hostility towards the attacker or his family. We thoroughly discourage the onset of such sentiment. The attacker has his issues, created in no small part by the conditions that dictate life in an under-resourced and deprived community scourged by a significant drug problem.
There are many young people growing up in communities where drugs and deprivation seem as natural as the dole queue. Let what happened to our sister and daughter, Sinead, be a salutary lesson to our youth. Drugs offer no escape, violence offers no solution.
Finally, we would like to thank the first responders from An Garda Siochana and the Health Service for their prompt assistance. We also are grateful to friends and neighbours of Sinead who have flooded us with messages of support and well wishes.
This is a very decent, dignified and generous response by the Connolly family both to the brutal attack on Sinead and to the sleazy smears of the tabloid media. I wish Sinead a swift and full recovery. My thoughts are also with Sinead's sister Orla, her brother Sean, and the rest of the Connolly family during this harrowing ordeal.
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