State watched O'Donnell grow into a killer

IN the early 1980s, I visited Loughan House, then used as a prison for young offenders. Talking to staff, it was clear that many of them were deeply worried about one 14 year old inmate.

The kid was violent and unstable, a constant danger to himself, to staff and to other inmates. Their relief at the thought that he was soon to be released at the end of his sentence was mixed with helpless guilt at the knowledge that he would certainly commit violent crimes on the outside. A senior official told me the boy was going to hurt somebody badly, and that there was nothing the system could do about it. He was not mentally ill, so he could not be committed to the Central Mental Hospital. After he had served his time, he would have to be let loose on an unsuspecting world.

Within a year, I heard the boy's name again, this time in court reports on a grim trial. He had raped a young girl in a Dublin churchyard, then stabbed to death a priest who had tried to stop him. The actual crimes were more vicious and shocking than might have been imagined, but in essence things had unfolded exactly as the institutions of justice knew they would.

So it was, too, with Brendan O'Donnell. The conviction of a murderer is not an occasion for "we are all guilty" hand wringing. In fact, Irish society, in the shape of the people of Whitegate and east Clare generally, emerges from the trauma with great dignity.

The kindness, tolerance and generosity O'Donnell could draw on, even from people who knew him to be disturbed and dangerous, are remarkable. At every point, there seemed to be people willing to help, talking him out of crimes, trying to put him on the right road, taking him into their homes, thinking about getting him a mobile home so he wouldn't have to live rough.

It would be an insult to those people to say society is guilty. But yet again, we can see that the basic values that animate their lives, values of compassion, decency and social justice, are not reflected in the State's institutions. There is a gap in Ireland between private instincts and public institutions, between private concern and public neglect, between the strength of the human bond on the one hand and the weakness of the civic bond on the other. Brendan O'Donnell and his victims fell into it.

BLAMING systems and institutions is always easier than facing up to the unfathomable evil of such acts. It offers, in the presence of awful irrationality, a certain refuge in the rational. It may well be that there is a darkness in the mind of a man like Brendan O'Donnell that no amount of social intervention could ever hope to enlighten. But even if we keep in mind the irreducible darkness of his acts, even if we refuse to trivialise the horror of three deaths by bombarding it with pious banalities, we still have to confront institutional failures that are, as defence counsel Paddy MacEntee put it, "breath taking".

One of the reasons for doing so is the hurt caused by the trial to the 35,000 Irish people directly affected by schizophrenia. The vague but probably persistent impression the public gets from the trial is that there is an innate connection between madness and badness, that it is, in effect, inevitable that someone like O'Donnell who suffers from some form of schizophrenia will commit violent crimes.

In fact, people with schizophrenia are less likely to be violent than the general population and more likely to be victims of violence. Throwing a word like schizophrenia at the horror may be in some way comforting, but it is also dishonest. Whatever happened inside Brendan O'Donnell's mind, it wasn't a simple result of mental illness.

Nor was it a result of any lack of official knowledge. Just as there was official knowledge that the kid I saw in Loughan House was certain to commit violent crimes, there was the same certainty about Brendan O'Donnell. For 15 years, the State's psychological services watched him grow into a killer. For five years, the police and penal systems dealt with an escalating pattern of violent crimes. In 1988, he was assessed as psychotic and a certain danger to society. But at no point did the State seem capable of doing anything to avert that danger.

And it is not at all clear that situation has greatly changed. Social work and psychiatric services have improved in the last few years. But the Kelly Fitzgerald case, and the fact that the official report on it has been withheld from the public, does not inspire confidence that intervention to protect young children in violent homes is much more likely now than it was when Brendan O'Donnell was growing up.

SALLY Shiels, president of the INTO, told me recently there is a significant number of children who are on the "at risk" register yet don't even have a social worker attached to them. Teachers in schools for children who have particular emotional disturbances tell of the difficulty of getting any backup or protection for the children outside the school.

Likewise, in most parts of the country, it is effectively impossible for primary schools to get disturbed pupils assessed by professional psychologists unless their parents can afford to pay for a private assessment. The truth is that there are almost certainly other Brendan O'Donnells being formed right now, and that far too little is being done to save them and their future victims.

The cost of providing such services early on in childhood is far less than it will be if those children go on to become involved in crime. We think nothing of the cost of prison places, of trials, of Garda time, and everything of the cost of remedial intervention before a fragile personality has been so irreparably damaged as to represent a danger to others. But that cost is nothing compared to the anguish of those who have lost their loved ones through acts of violence that were entirely predictable. We owe it to those victims to start identifying tomorrow's potential killers today and creating structures in which the damage that has been done to them is repaired before it is repeated on others.

. In last week's column about the use of the Army at the installation of Bishop Murray of Limerick, I reported that the Catholic Press and Information Office had told me the diocese had not requested Army involvement in the ceremony. I have since learned that this is untrue. The diocesan secretary wrote to the Army on February 28th to say. "The Bishop and those involved in the preparation of this ceremony would very much like the Army to be represented. In particular, an honour guard within the cathedral and a Guard of Honour outside the cathedral before the ceremony is requested if that is feasible".