Publicly name our son’s now-adult murderer, Cameron’s parents urge
THE parents of Cameron Blair have expressed their relief after their son’s killer failed in his bid to reduce the severity of his life sentence.
Cameron’s father Noel Blair said the process of travelling from Cork to Dublin to see their son’s murderer – who cannot currently be named – in court was challenging, but added it was important that they were there to ‘represent Cameron’.
He told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘Every time he was up you got a week or two and then there was something else. I suppose we don’t have to travel up, but at the end of the day we have to represent Cameron. That is very important to us.’
During last week’s hearing at the Court of Appeal, Mr Blair told how the grandfather of their son’s killer was sitting ‘right in front of us’.
He also said he and his wife Kathy hope the man who killed their son is publicly named. The killer was just months shy of his 18th birthday when he stabbed Cameron in a totally unprovoked attack with a 21cm knife. He is now aged 21 and the Blairs want him to be named as soon as possible.
Mr Blair told the MoS: ‘We want him named because there is a link that will only make sense when he is named. Even people in Cork aren’t aware of that.
‘It’d be great to be able to name him; Kathy would be over the moon about that,’ he added.
Mr Blair said that, although they might like to ‘nullify’ Christmas following the murder of their ‘kind and gentle’ son, they keep going for the sake of their other son.
‘We just keep going; at the end of the day we have to think of Alan. We can’t nullify Christmas as much as we might like to. We have to try to have some sort of normality.
‘We just have to keep going.’ Twenty-year-old Cameron died after he was stabbed in the neck at a house party on the Bandon Road in Cork on January 16, 2020.
The Central Criminal Court trial heard Cameron had been at a party and was acting as ‘a peacemaker’ between people in the house and another group seeking re-entry when he was fatally stabbed in the neck.
The student’s then teenage killer was sentenced to life in detention at Oberstown Children Detention Campus in Lusk, Co. Dublin, in April, 2020. The sentence was backdated to January 24, 2020, when the offender was taken into custody.
He was transferred to an adult prison following his 18th birthday.
Last week the man who ended Cameron’s life, ‘extinguishing the life of a decent and upstanding young man’, failed in his bid to reduce the severity of his life sentence with a review after 13 years.
The Court of Appeal found the trial judge had properly taken into account the defendant’s lack of maturity, had set a sentence that was proportionate, and had sufficient regard for mitigating factors identified by the defence.
The three-judge court also dismissed a claim that, by placing the review at 13 years, the judge had deprived the defendant of the right to apply for parole after serving 12 years.
Delivering the judgment, Judge Isobel Kennedy said murder is ‘one of the most serious offences in our statute books’.
She said the defendant in this case was aged 17 years and eight months at the time of this ‘terrible offence, extinguishing the life of a decent and upstanding young man; a young man who did nothing but seek to restore peace to a situation which was not of his making. This appellant’s actions deprived this young man of his life, and took him away from his loving parents, family and friends.’
She described the defendant’s conduct in arming himself, displaying the knife and tapping it on his leg while laughing before delivering the fatal blow as ‘shocking and deliberate’.
The judge noted: ‘His actions were cowardly and callous. ‘The fact that this appellant appeared to have no hesitation in displaying the knife as he did by tapping it against his leg prior to the vicious attack, is most concerning.’
Judge Kennedy said the trial judge, Judge Paul McDermott, made a careful assessment of all the facts with ‘conspicuous care and diligence, taking account of all material factors’.
She said no error in principle had been identified and the sentence was not outside the range available to the judge.
The Court of Appeal will decide at a later date whether the anonymity of the accused remains in place considering he is now aged 21 years and no longer a minor.
‘We have to try to have some sort of normality’
‘His actions were cowardly and callous’