A woman who survived a murder-suicide incident which claimed the lives of her husband and two sons in north Cork has died following a long illness.
The Irish Times reports that Anne O’Sullivan, from Raheen in Kanturk, died on Wednesday morning some six months after the murder of her son Mark (26) by her husband, Tadg (59), and her younger son, Diarmuid (23).
Ms O’Sullivan (60) was at the isolated farmhouse on the morning of October 26th last year when Tadg and Diarmuid shot Mark in his bedroom in a row over a will leaving him the 115-acre farm.
She fled the scene but Tadg and Diarmuid caught up with her in the farmyard and told her she would have to live with the torment of what had happened.
Ms O’Sullivan had been discharged from hospital just two weeks earlier after surgery for a terminal medical condition.
She managed to raise the alarm just after 7am on October 26th, prompting a major garda operation involving armed gardaí from Cork and Dublin.
Mark’s body was recovered from a bedroom, while the bodies of Tadg and Diarmuid were found in a field.
Gardaí said that they were not looking for anyone else in connection with the incident and were treating it as a murder-suicide.
Ms O’Sullivan later attended the funerals of Tadg and Diarmuid who were buried together following a joint funeral at St Mary’s Church in Castlemagner.
A day later she attended a separate funeral for Mark at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Kanturk. Mark was buried in Ms O’Sullivan’s own Cronin family grave in a separate cemetery.
According to The Irish Times, Ms O’Sullivan, a former nurse, had not returned to live at the farmhouse where the tragedy unfolded but had been staying with cousins who lived nearby in Castlemagner.
