A TRAVELLER woman and her family were burned out of their home on a halting site in Dublin late last night. The fire was started by four armed and masked men who arrived by car, held members of the family at gunpoint and threw a petrol bomb into their caravan.
The incident occurred on a site behind the Guinness brewery on James's Street, where there has been an official travellers' halting site for many years. The Garda said they were treating it as "suspicious" and maintaining a presence on the site through the night.
Nobody was injured, but the caravan was reduced to a tangled mass of blackened rubble after the blaze had been put out. The woman's eight year old daughter, Christine Maguire, was being treated for shock overnight in Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children, in Crumlin.
Another girl, Anne Marie Maguire, said one of the raiders had pointed a gun in her face, while her cousin, Angela Joyce, said another man had held a knife held to her neck. The woman's nephew, John Joyce (12), said they told him to lie on the ground "or they would kill me".
Mrs Muriel Maguire said she had lost everything in the fire, claiming that the arsonists involved had been "paid off to do this". With her voice lowered to a whisper by tonsillitis, she told The Irish Times that she believed they were from the settled community.
She also said it may have been a case of mistaken identity and that their real target was a man who had been "involved in a row" some days ago. This man had occupied a caravan in the same hardstand on the site, but he had since moved somewhere else, Mrs Maguire added.
"I owe £1,400 on that caravan and look at it now", she said, adding that she had seven children, including one with spina bifida. "Where are we going to go? We've lost the clothes, the beds, the TV set and all the little bits and pieces I've collected over the years".
As small groups of men stood around the bleak, rain sodden halting site early today, the Garda said it was unclear whether the fire was the result of a row among the travellers themselves or an attack by vigilantes. "With what's been happening around that area lately, you couldn't be sure."
