Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Fatal crash gran avoids prison over boy’s death
Council gives distraught mum 30 days to change teenager’s grave
A GRANDMOTHER who killed her grandson in a car crash was given 150 hours’ community service yesterday.
Belfast Crown Court heard Margaret Saunders was “deeply remorseful’’ and “wished she had died’’.
The two-car collision on Boxing Day, 2016, claimed the life of seven-year-old Jackson Turner.
Retired health service worker Saunders, from Forthill Park in Newtownabbey, Co Antrim, pleaded guilty to causing death by careless driving.
Prosecution counsel Ciaran Murphy QC told the court the 73-year-old was travelling along the Old Carrick Road towards Carrickfergus between 6pm and 6.30pm when she hit two cars.
During the first incident, her wing mirror clipped the wing mirror of a Citroen Picasso coming in the opposite direction.
Just a few seconds later, “her Nissan Micra crossed 80cm into the other lane colliding almost head-on with a Nissan Almera”.
Jackson, strapped into a booster seat behind his gran, suffered “catastrophic and fatal injuries”. His sister escaped uninjured.
Saunders spent five weeks undergoing treatment for multiple fractures including a broken pelvis and a bleed on the brain.
She was disqualified from driving for 12 months. A GRIEVING mum hit out at council chiefs yesterday after they ordered her to remove the headstone from her son’s grave.
Margaret Mongan said Lisburn and Castlereagh Council has given her 30 days to get rid of the marble memorial and replace it with a smaller one.
Mrs Mongan, from the Poleglass area of West Belfast, received a letter from the Parks and Amenities Department last week telling her the plot has to be changed “following a health and safety inspection”.
The demand relates to her son John’s grave at the cemetery on Blaris Road in Lisburn. He died in 2011, aged 14.
The letter, dated January 12, said: “The council would ask you to remove the headstone, surround and granite tiles that has [sic] been placed on your grave.
“Once completed, the plot will be reinstated by the council using natural turf which will lessen the visual impact and will thereafter maintain the grass in line with the rest of the cemetery.”
Mrs Mongan told the Mirror she has been left “very upset”. She said: “It’s the Traveller tradition to use large headstones. It’s the way we remember our dead. But to be told I’ve 30 days to remove the gravestone, it’s very, very difficult.
“John passed away in 2011 but the headstone’s only there since 2012. I rang the council and they said I have to do it.
“They claimed they’d written to me in 2012 about it but I never got that letter. Even if they did, how can they then write, in 2018, giving me 30 days to remove this?
“The grave has everything on it that represents John – his Xbox, his computer and that. They said if I don’t remove it they’ll take action.
“It’s a lovely graveyard with all the graves well-kept, including John’s. This will break my and my children’s hearts.”
Mrs Mongan has started an online petition regarding her plight and it has attracted thousands of signatures.
She said after raising the issue on
Facebook, she was contacted by another person who claimed they too have been told to change a loved one’s grave.
John’s twin brother William, 21, said: “It will kill my family if we have to do this. It was very expensive.
“There’s no way we can touch this headstone, our belief is it’s disturbing the dead and that is a big sin for us. We are Roman Catholic and
BELFAST YESTERDAY
very religious people and this is a very upsetting time.
“If there was something wrong with it, why did they not say in the beginning?
“It is not doing any harm, it is well kept and it would be against our tradition to touch that grave. The Irish Travelling community would not have it, they will stop it.”
A spokeswoman for Lisburn and Castlereagh City Council said: “The New Blaris Cemetery Extension in Lisburn is a lawn cemetery which effectively means that each plot should be marked solely by a headstone.
“We have written to plot holders to remind them of this policy and ask that they remove any additional materials such as Astroturf to facilitate the safe maintenance of their plot by the council.
“We appreciate this is a sensitive matter and all plot holders are advised to contact the Cemeteries Office to discuss any concerns or difficulties they have.”