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Crime News Journal is a news Blog based In Ireland, reporting on news about the illicit drugs trade national and international plus other crime stories, in addition to more general news items.
Showing posts with label Ballyfermot' Dublin: Shot Sean (6) Now Facing Years In A Wheelchair. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ballyfermot' Dublin: Shot Sean (6) Now Facing Years In A Wheelchair. Show all posts
Press Association - Noirin O'Sullivan took over from Martin Callinan as acting Garda head
Ireland is becoming a more violent place to live, the country's top police officer has warned.
Acting Garda Commissioner Noirin O'Sullivan said a soaring murder rate could not be blamed on organised crime but suggested it was down to a general decline in society.
"I think certainly there is more of rush to violence, and not just in terms of death but I think also in terms of serious injuries and people not thinking before they act," she said.
Official figures released less than two weeks ago showed a surge in the number of murders across the State despite an overall dip in most other types of crime.
There were 60 people murdered between March last year and the same month this year - more than one person murdered every week.
The figure is up more than 36% - from 44 - for the same period the previous year.
Overall, homicides or killings - which include manslaughter and dangerous driving leading to death - have increased by more than a fifth (23%).
"The increase in homicides is not attributable to organised crime but it certainly is attributable to more of a propensity to violence," Ms O'Sullivan told a parliamentary watchdog.
The Garda chief pointed in particular to a rise in the number of murders committed within the home as a indication of a deterioration in standards.
"Some of it would be - and I don't like using the term domestic - but they would be familial as opposed to other types of interaction such as organised crime," she said.
"Certainly I think there is something there to do with responsible behaviour and awareness."
Ms O'Sullivan, who has taken over as interim head of the force after her predecessor Martin Callinan's resignation earlier this year, was speaking before the Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee.
Five Garth Brooks concerts scheduled for Dublin were cancelled yesterday
Garth Brooks has told promoter Peter Aiken that if there is any chance that the five planned concerts can be salvaged and "nobody is being let down" then "we can proceed as planned until the refunds begin".
In a letter sent to Mr Aiken, the musician says his gear and crew are still en route, but if he is told "Garth, thanks but it is over", he will bring them back to the US.
Mr Brooks said to play for 400,000 people would be a dream, but to tell 160,000 of those that they are not welcome would be a nightmare.
He wrote: "I cannot begin to tell you how badly my heart is breaking right now".
Earlier, Ticketmaster released details of how to get refunds for the five cancelled concerts.
Hundreds of thousands of fans were left disappointed yesterday when it was announced that none of the shows planned for Dublin would be going ahead.
Dublin City Council had given permission for three of the five concerts and over 400,000 people had bought tickets for the shows.
Ticket holders who made the purchase over the phone, online or mobile need do nothing.
The company said a full refund, including service charges, will automatically be returned to the card used to make the purchase from 15 July.
Ticketmaster said people should allow up to ten days for the refund to reach their account.
People who purchased tickets from unauthorised ticket sellers will need to contact that ticket seller to obtain a refund, the company said.
For tickets purchased through Ticketmaster ticket centres, a refund form is available from the company's website, ticketmaster.ie/gbrefunds.
Tickets can also be returned in person at ticket centres from 15 July.
Ticketmaster managing director Keith English said there will be a very significant cost for his company and the situation was not good for any of the parties involved.
He said Ticketmaster would increase its staffing levels and have a team specifically for refunding Garth Brooks tickets purchased through outlets, because that was where the company felt the most difficulty would be.
Meanwhile, Chairman of the Oireachtas Committee on Transport and Communications John O'Mahony has said it has decided to write to the GAA, Aiken Promotions and Dublin City Council to ask them to appear before the committee tomorrow.
The committee wants to establish the chain of events that led to the cancellation of the five concerts.
Mr O'Mahony said the committee also wants to explore the knock-on effect to tourism.
It is hoped the committee will meet tomorrow and Friday.
The GAA and Aiken Promotions have already accepted the request to attend. Dublin City Council said it had only just received the request and had no further comment at this time.
Resident drops High Court action
A Dublin city resident has announced he is dropping the High Court case against the Garth Brooks concerts.
Although the singer has cancelled his concerts, Brian Duff from Ballybough is removing the legal case in the hope that Garth Brooks will reconsider his decision to cancel the three concerts.
Speaking through Lord Mayor Christy Burke, who read a statement on his behalf, Mr Duff said he and his family had been subjected to threats on social media since news of his injunction broke yesterday.
He also had to stay in a bed and breakfast last night.
Mr Duff said he had taken the legal action against the GAA, not Mr Brooks, because he believed the organisation was breaking the law by holding more than three concerts.
However, he now feels that the point has been made.
The High Court was funded, he said, by €15,000 he collected from friends in GAA circles north and south of the border.
However, he has now instructed his solicitor Anthony Fay to withdraw it.
City loses €50m with cancellation of gigs
In the Dáil this morning, Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin said there is an air of disbelief about a cancelled major economic project.
He said it will cost the city about €50m, that 70,000 inward tourists had been due to attend, and that about 200,000 hotel bookings had been cancelled.
He said that "surely the Government should have intervened" given the enormity of the issue.
Taoiseach Enda Kenny said he is as disappointed as anybody else in the country that Ireland has lost this international music event and the economic value it would have brought.
He said Dublin City Council made its decision in accordance with the current planning regulations.
If the Government was to intervene, he said, it would have been accused of "coming the heavy" on an issue such as this.
He said that there have not been difficulties before at similar events and he has asked Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan to look at the application process.
The promoter of the cancelled shows earlier said he is "shell-shocked" and "devastated" by the calling-off of the event.
Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland, Peter Aiken said the country music star would not disappoint 160,000 people by only performing three of the planned five-night run.
Mr Aiken said Dublin City Council made him aware of traffic and parking issues that needed to be planned for, but it was never suggested that five concerts was going to cause problems.
He said: "This would have been a spectacular show and it couldn't have gone anywhere else."
He said he thinks Mr Brooks made the right decision, because all along he had told him everything was going to be okay.
Mr Aiken said Dublin City Council had made him aware that the company's license application would require "additionality" in terms of parking and stewardship, but he said the council gave him no indication that the staging of five concerts was in question.
He added: "You presume you're going to get the licence.
"I never got any indication, no matter what Dublin City Council say - they did say that five shows was a big ask when we went to see them but I never got any indication that this was in trouble.
"They said it was going to have a massive impact."
"We had to have the licence in ten weeks before the event, we had the licence in 14 weeks before the event," he said.
"I'd say back to Dublin City Council if it was such a problem then, why didn't you tell us that it wasn't going to run."
Mr Aiken said that the concerts will not go ahead anywhere else in Ireland this year.
When questioned about what he would say to residents who feel they had been rail-roaded into agreeing to these concerts, Mr Aiken said that he had planned for these concerts in conjunction with Croke Park and Dublin City Council.
The fact that the council had offered to allow four concerts would suggest that it did not think residents were being rail-roaded, he added.
Croke Park residents were very surprised and disappointed that there was no resolution, according to a residents' association representative.
Croke Park Streets Committee Chairman Eamon O'Brien said the people who were responsible were those who did not operate by the licensing laws.
Also Speaking on Morning Ireland, Mr O'Brien said a planned High Court injunction to stop any concerts going ahead was supported by the committee.
He said despite reports of secret talks and meetings over the last seven days, no one had approached the residents.
He added: "A crisis occasion often concentrates the mind and leads parties in a new direction and this didn't happen and the mediation process didn't work out."
The managing director of rival concert promoter MCD, meanwhile, has described the cancelling of all five concerts as a "shambles".
Speaking on the same programme, Denis Desmond said acts will be more careful about holding concerts in Ireland in the future, to ensure that there will not be a repeat of the current controversy.
Mr Desmond said there was nothing wrong with the licensing system and he did not believe there would be an end to the practice of selling tickets before a licence was issued.
Looking for five extra shows was unprecedented, he said, and was clearly seen as one step too many by Dublin City Council.
Mr Desmond said he was surprised Garth Brooks had not done the three shows that had been granted permission to proceed and then perform the other two shows at a different location.
Extra police officers on Chicago’s streets were not enough to quell a long weekend of violence that ended with 14 people shot dead and dozens more injured.
During a news conference yesterday, just hours after two more people were shot to death earlier in the day, Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said his department’s best efforts could not prevent the bloodshed that spiked dramatically on Sunday.
Chicago’s total of 53 shooting incidents for the holiday weekend easily eclipsed Detroit and New York combined, which had a total of 46 shooting incidents, 10 of which were fatal.
“Going into the holiday weekend we had a plan, including putting hundreds more officers on the streets and what were the results?” Mr McCarthy asked.
“The results were a lot of shootings, a lot of murders, unfortunately.”
The shootings over the Fourth of July holiday weekend included eight incidents that involved police, according to Mr McCarthy.
In five of those instances, officers shot at suspects. Two people – both 16 - were killed in those shoot-outs. He said that based on preliminary investigations, all of the officer-involved shootings appear to have been justified, including one in which officers fired after a suspect tried to run them over with his car.
Mr McCarthy, who came to the third-largest US city from New York, used the opportunity to again highlight the number of guns that are on Chicago’s streets.
While Chicago has tough gun sales and possession ordinances, he maintains that Illinois needs stiffer penalties for people who violate gun laws.
He said his officers are seeing more suspects who are reluctant to throw down their guns when confronted by police because they are more concerned with harsh treatment from their gangs if they lose their weapons than the legal system if they are arrested with them.
“Possession of a loaded firearm is not even considered a violent felony in the state of Illinois for sentencing purposes,” Mr McCarthy said, noting that gangs, on the other hand, may severely beat a member who loses a gun.
The latest spate of shootings also indicates how dangerous the streets can be, particularly in the summer when the warm weather puts more people on the streets.
The police chief noted that nearly half of the 53 shooting incidents over the holiday weekend happened on Sunday, when temperatures climbed into the upper 80s Fahrenheit (low 30s Celsius).
Still, the superintendent stressed that even with the weekend deaths, Chicago has had fewer murders as of July 6 (185) than it did for the same period last year (196). At the same time, he said, the city has had 46 more shooting incidents than last year.
A SCHOOLBOY shot by accident last month is facing a long period in a wheelchair, but his family hope that he will walk again.
Six-year-old Sean Scully was shot while playing with friends on a green near his house in Croftwood Gardens, Ballyfermot, west Dublin, on June 13. The gunman, who was attempting to shoot someone else in the vicinity, went on the run following the shooting.
The little boy's mother Gillian Scully has revealed how Sean suffered spinal injuries in the shooting, but how he was lucky that his spinal chord was only bruised by the bullet - not severed.
"He still has no movement. We're just trying to keep him pain-free, here in the hospital," Ms Scully said.
Speaking to Joe Duffy on RTE radio's LiveLine, Ms Scully explained how the family had returned from Thunder Road Cafe, where they were celebrating his older bother Shane's birthday, on the night of the shooting.
They took the bus home before Sean asked if he could play football with his friends.
PLAYING
"We had only got off the bus at 10 o'clock. When we walked over, a few of the kids were playing out so Sean played for a minute.
"I went in, the door was open and within five minutes it happened.
"We heard a bang, but as you probably know up there, there has been a lot of stolen cars and that, so we thought it was a car.
"We ran out and the kids were running in. They were just screaming, it was just bedlam," Ms Scully said.
"Sean was on the ground, he was awake, he was asking 'help me up, help me up'.
"There were just crowds, we don't know where the people came from. It was just chaos," she said.
Ms Scully explained how her older son could see what had happened and was asking for help, but she was expecting an older boy to be on the ground. "When we ran out it was Sean," she said.
Though Sean had been shot in the neck, Ms Scully said: "He didn't realise. He just said 'help me up, can you get me up?'
"He didn't know what was after happening to him then at that stage," she explained.
The gardai and ambulance arrived quickly and Ms Scully praised their work.
"I thought he was gone, when people were trying to talk to him, you know to keep him awake and that.
"His eyes would roll and I thought he would go any second. I didn't know what to think," she said.
On the way to the hospital and after he had arrived, Ms Scully said that Sean was talking and was responsive.
The mother explained how the bullet had gone through her son's neck and to his spine before lodging at the top of his back left rib.
"They operated on the Sunday and they got that out but it damaged the top of his spine," she said.
The family was told that night that doctors weren't sure what was going to happen ahead of the three-hour operation to fit plates into his spine.
"They had told us this operation is just to try and help, it probably won't help, but his spinal chord wasn't damaged, but it was severely bruised," Ms Scully said.
She added that if the spinal chord was nicked, her son would never have been able to walk again.
"Because it's severely bruised, they're hopeful for, eventually, a few steps. Now they said he'd never get back to normal, but well we're hopeful too."
ORDEAL:
The whole ordeal has left the youngster confused and Ms Scully said that Sean has asked what happened to him.
"At that stage I didn't want to tell him, I didn't want to frighten him.
"I just wanted to make out to him that it wasn't his fault that no one wanted to hurt him," she said.
To date just one person has been arrested in connection with the incident. However that was in relation to withholding information from gardai.
Meanwhile, Sean has been suffering from nightmares and flashbacks since the horrifying incident.
His lungs are also very weak so he remains on machines to help him to clear his throat.
"He's in a wheelchair definitely. He's hoisted to a wheelchair, we can't even lift him," Ms Scully said, adding that he had no feeling from his chest down.
Doctors hope that he will soon gain the upper body strength that will allow him to push the wheelchair and the family accept that a wheelchair will be part of their lives for a long time.
Sean will be transferred in around six weeks to the National Rehabilitation Hospital, in Dun Laoghaire.
"His life's changed forever now and even though they said they're hopeful for a few steps, it could be five or six years down the line before he might," his mother said.
Ms Scully said that people were shocked when they heard about what happened to her son. Even though her family have nothing to do with crime, she feels she has to explain.
HORRIFIC
"I feel like I kind of need to let people know that. I know they're probably not judging me, but that's how I feel," she said.
Sean plays with his PlayStation computer in Our Lady's Children's Hospital Crumlin and his mother brings him a new toy every day.
"He's going to suffer for a long time. A lot of people have been asking how he is. He's good in himself, so people think he's doing well. But he has an extremely long road ahead of him. The injuries are horrific," she said.
Gillian has quit her part-time job to look after Sean fulltime.
Overall, homicides or killings - which include manslaughter and dangerous driving leading to death - have increased by more than a fifth (23%).
