O'Loan: Attacks on kids nearly made me quit
Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman Nuala O’Loan reveals today how the emotional strain of attacks on her children almost forced her from the post.
But the mother-of-five’s family insisted she press ahead with the ground-breaking job that has thrust her into the centre of a maelstrom of controversy over police reforms.
In a wide-ranging interview, broadcast this morning on RTE Radio 1, Ms O'Loan speaks for the first time about how attacks on her sons took their toll.
“When your little boy is brought home, someone having stood on his head, and you can still see the footprint… that’s very troubling,” she told broadcaster Eamon Dunphy.
“I remember when Kieran was attacked the second time saying to him: ’I can go back to the university, I don’t need to do this, you’re more important’ and he said: ’No… what you’re doing is important’.”
Ms O’Loan and her husband, SDLP Ballymena councillor Declan O’Loan’s family have been subjected to violence and intimidation since she became the first official police watchdog in the North in 1999.
She lost her unborn baby in 1977 after surviving an IRA bomb attack at the then Ulster Polytechnic in Jordanstown where she worked as a law lecturer.
“The fact that my child was deprived of life, because somebody decided that we were all dispensable in some cause, was enormously hard to deal with,” she said.
