Inquest 'must examine medical care of mum who killed her children'

Dad says wife's condition had not been properly diagnosed

- SEAN McCARTHAIGH

A DAD of three kids killed by their mum called for the scope of their inquests to be widened to examine the diagnosis and treatment of his wife’s mental illness before the tragedy. 

Lawyers for Andrew McGinley have asked the coroner to look into the medical care of Deirdre Morley for the two years preceding the deaths of their children.

However, the application has been challenged by the legal representative of a consultant psychiatrist, Olivia Gibbons, who had treated Morley six months earlier.

The couple’s children – Conor, nine, Darragh, seven, and three-year-old Carla – died at their family home at Parson’s Court, Newcastle, Co Dublin, on January 24, 2020.

A previous sitting of Dublin District Coroner’s Court later that year heard the three young siblings had died from suffocation.

Morley, a paediatric nurse, was found not guilty of their murders by reason of insanity following a trial at the Central Criminal Court in May 2021.

ILLNESS

At a sitting of the coroner’s court yesterday, counsel for Mr McGinley, Damien Higgins, told a resumed hearing the killer had suffered from mental illness and was under the care of the HSE prior to “this desperate sad event”.

He pointed out she had been an in-patient at a private psychiatric hospital less than six months before the death of her children.