A haunting question on Nicola’s murder

THAT Cathal O’Sullivan was yesterday sentenced to life in prison for the brutal murder of Nicola Collins is exactly as it should be. For Ms Collins herself, and for the grieving family that she has left behind, justice has been done. For there was no ambiguity whatsoever in this horrific case where the deceased, in the most prolonged and graphically savage manner, was beaten to death in O’Sullivan’s apartment in March of last year.

However, while the specific details and circumstances of a previous assault by O’Sullivan on a former girlfriend have not yet all come to light, more than a degree of disquiet must surely now arise as the result of yesterday’s comments from a garda in relation to this earlier attack. That Nicola Collins’s murderer had already assaulted another woman, leaving her, as described by the garda in question, with a fractured skull and multiple bruising, and so injured that she was unable even to muster the physical wherewithal to raise the alarm for some days, is utterly horrifying.

That the accused received nothing more than a three-year suspended sentence back in 2013 for that ferocious attack is both deeply disturbing and, frankly, completely incomprehensible.

For, even taking the bare facts of this most grievous assault at face value and while still in the dark in relation to the precise nature and particulars of the earlier attack, how could someone on the one hand be deemed responsible for such savagery, and then, on the other, permitted to walk free from court with only a suspended sentence to contend with by way of any kind of punishment?

Speculation and what-if scenarios do not necessarily, of course, equate to a defined reality but, nonetheless, it must be extremely difficult, virtually impossible in fact, for Nicola Collins’s family to ignore what might have been had O’Sullivan received a proper and appropriately long custodial sentence five years ago. Would Nicola Collins still be alive? We simply don’t know the answer to that question. But it is, nonetheless, a question well worth asking.