John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail)

Words are completely inadequate, but I want to share some thoughts in spite of that. I warmly welcome the steps taken by my colleague the Minister for Justice, Jim O'Callaghan, to try to bring some - I will not say closure - sense and reason to the awful events that happened in Carrickmacross a decade and a half ago.

6 o’clock

I am very happy the Leas-Cheann Comhairle is in the Chair to oversee the proceedings.

When you get a little older in life, certainly in my case anyway, you become acutely aware as each decade passes of your mortality. It might seem odd to raise my mortality in the context of this debate - I just mean in relation to anybody's mortality. Why do I raise it? You become so pronouncedly aware of the value of life, the moment of life, the uniqueness and individuality of life and the passing phase of life and the unique, amazing opportunity we all have as human beings to have been born and to have experienced life. The one thing we learn is that some people are so careless about other people's lives. That is a point that really impacts me as I get older and as one begins to appreciate the value, importance and pricelessness of time. It is those thoughts that are to the front of my mind when I think of the O'Farrell family who are sitting behind me this evening.

I took an interest in this as a newish Deputy when we were in opposition between 2016 and 2020 for one reason, and one reason only, which is that the Leas-Cheann Comhairle, Deputy John McGuinness, kept raising it at Fianna Fáil parliamentary party meetings. I did not know who Shane O'Farrell was. I did not who Lucia O'Farrell was or who the O'Farrell family were, but John McGuinness kept raising it. He was relentless as an advocate and I must say, my admiration for him, which had been considerable at that time, just grew and evolved because he just would not let it go.

One Saturday evening, by arrangement with Lucia and her husband, I drove up and visited them. Her husband asked the most important question at the end of the night: what can you do? Why have you come here? I did not have an answer to that, except in my own head I was hoping that the gesture was enough to show that this was not going away and that we would continue to do our best to highlight this until we got to some semblance of truth in the matter. As I would expect from him, the Minister has very eloquently outlined each failure in terms of some of the organs of the State, so there is no point in me going back over that. Of course, the people who have expressed these facts most articulately and cogently are the O'Farrell family themselves. My admiration for them is boundless. They have kept the memory and the issue around Shane's needless death alive.

There are just two bits I would like to paraphrase from the Minister's speech. He said he agrees with the O'Farrell's that had the convictions of 16 February, 23 February, 8 March, 9 May, 11 May, 8 June, 15 July and 25 July been brought to the attention of Judge O'Hagan, the outcome of this could have been so much more different. He went on to say that his report is not a report that needs to establish facts since those facts are very readily apparent from the charges laid against Gridziuska in the year leading up to the death of Shane O'Farrell. In those lines is also contained the need for the apology to the O'Farrell family because in spite of all those facts, justice was not done.

There is a poem written by Linda Ellis called "The Dash". Some people may be familiar with it. It essentially relates to a summary of people's lives. The dash is contained between the year they were born and the year that they passed away. I will go back to my original point about how careless some people are with the lives of others. That carelessness, and the carelessness of the State through various organs of State, ensured that the dash in the case of Shane O'Farrell's life denotes a very short period of time. I will quote from the poem:

For that dash represents all the time

That they spent ... [alive] on earth.

And now only those who loved them

Know what that ... [little] line is worth.

I hope in a tiny way that the moves by my colleague, the Minister for Justice, Deputy Jim O'Callaghan, today in terms of the speech he delivered, the apology he delivered and, most particularly, the commemorative piece in terms of the scholarship that is being initiated in memory of Shane O'Farrell goes some way to ensuring that the dash in his biography continues for time to come.

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