Between them, Gavin and Milly underwent 18 operations and they still receive daily medical treatment, writes Kathy Sheridan
In a city striving to lift itself and its image above routine reports of murderous feuds, gun-toting teenagers and gross intimidation, the petrol bomb attack on a car which turned two small children into human fireballs in September 2006, appeared to mark a savage, new low.
When it emerged that the three accused youths were themselves still children, people despaired. After turning themselves in within a few days of the atrocity, they could not be publicly named because they themselves were children in the eyes of the law. Two of them had just turned 17; the third had celebrated his 16th birthday that same week.
But while politicians and media called for draconian measures, including drafting the Army on to the streets of Limerick, local gardaí were adopting a more measured approach, privately describing the case as "a huge tragedy", not only for the critically injured children, but for the families of the perpetrators.
It was evident at an early stage that gardaí accepted that the accused boys did not know there were children in the car when the petrol bomb was thrown. At the sentencing hearing a few weeks ago, State counsel John O'Sullivan agreed that this was the prosecution's position.
But back in the tinder box atmosphere of Pineview Gardens and Delmege Park in the inner recesses of the Moyross estate in September 2006, local women told The Irish Times of violent incidents and intimidation so routine they hardly made it into the local media, never mind the national press.
Two nights before the arson attack on Sheila Murray's car, youths had rampaged in and out of people's back gardens, hiding bottles filled with petrol before launching them at gardaí. "It's like living on a time bomb," said one woman miserably. In an atmosphere already rife with intimidation in this small pocket of the 1,100-house estate, the stage was set for tragedy.
On the Sunday afternoon of September 10th, 2006, Sheila Murray, a mother of eight aged from 17 to 2, dropped in to visit her friend Aishling Bond at Pineview Gardens, leaving two of her children, Gavin (4) and Milly (6) in the back of her green Toyota Corolla.
As she went towards the house at about 1.45, she was approached by two boys. One was Jonathan O'Donoghue, then 17, one of seven children whose parents had separated when he was six. He had already been in trouble with the law. He had collected four previous convictions relating to public order and car theft, but had done well in his Junior Cert and had served a year as a carpenter's apprentice. The other boy was Robert Sheehan, who also had a number of convictions although he was only 16. He was one of four children of separated parents.
O'Donoghue and Sheehan asked Ms Murray for a lift to the District Court, where a special 2pm Sunday sitting was being held to deal with the weekend trouble-makers. When she refused, saying that she had to take the children to visit their father in Garryowen, the pair walked away, shouting threats and abuse.
At Casey's shop down the road, they met John Mitchell, a 17-year-old who up to this had led what probation officers called "a stable, law-abiding life", abusing neither drugs nor alcohol. He had no previous convictions, had never missed a day at school, and was about to move into Leaving Cert year, with a hugely promising football career ahead of him in England.
There had been no previous hostility between the accused and the Murrays, yet they made the decision to burn Sheila Murray's car as a kind of reprisal. They returned towards Aishling Bond's house where O'Donoghue and Mitchell climbed into her back garden while Sheehan walked across to his own house nearby to act as look-out.
Sheila Murray and her children were still inside the house when one of the three opened two of the car windows. Then back in the garden, using the petrol bomb-making paraphernalia still lying there after the violent weekend, O'Donoghue and Mitchell siphoned petrol from a gallon drum into an empty plastic Lucozade bottle, stuffed magazine paper into the top and lit it. Hiding behind a wall, unaware that Sheila Murray had by now strapped her two children into the car and had gone back to wait for her friend to come out, O'Donoghue hurled the bottle with catastrophic accuracy, straight through the rear side window of the Corolla, engulfing the children in flames.
"The children", said the State prosecutor, John O'Sullivan, "were turned into human fireballs". While Sheila Murray managed to pull Milly from the inferno of black smoke and flames, she was unable to see Gavin. While O'Donoghue and Mitchell fled, it was the Murrays' Moyross neighbours, including Robert Sheehan, the boy who had acted as look-out, who rescued the four-year-old.
In her victim impact statement read at the last sentencing hearing, she spoke of her "guilt" that she was not able to get Gavin out with Milly: "He might not have been burnt so bad if I was able to get him".
Between them, Gavin and Milly have undergone 18 operations involving skin grafts and reconstruction surgery, during six months in hospital. A "small withered scar" is all that remains of the little boy's left ear. He suffered 25 per cent burns to his face, head, back and hands and was in such excruciating pain that he needed sedation while his wounds were being cleaned and re-bandaged in hospital. Milly sustained 30 per cent burns to her face, right arm, right thigh and lower back. Dr David Orr, a consultant plastic surgeon, said they would suffer "severe permanent disfigurement".
Both children will require medical treatment for many years to come. Psychologically, too, the nightmare continues. The entire family has had to receive counselling. Both children are too frightened to sleep alone and Gavin suffers from recurring nightmares, in which he dreams that his hospital bed is on fire.
Three months after the tragedy, when it became known that the city council had purchased a house for the family in the Clonile Estate, a private development on the Old Cratloe Road, some residents on that estate organised a petition against the move, saying that they were acting out of "fear and not prejudice". The family has since moved into a large four-bedroom house on the estate, which it rents from the council. Both Gavin and Milly now attend Ballynanty National School and it is there that they receive their daily medical treatment now.