First published in Ireland On Sunday (now the Irish Mail on Sunday) on 19/11/2006
By: MICHAEL O’FARRELL
Investigative Correspondent
THE DARK Vauxhall Vectra dipped its lights and silently drew to a halt alongside the low wooden fence in front of Thomas O’Hare’s rural Armagh home.
It was 8.45pm on Monday, November 6, a date that already stands out even in Northern Ireland’s brutal and tortured history.
The country around Tassagh is idyllic and the bungalow on the Foley Road commands sweeping views of Seagahan forest and lake.
But the occupants of the Vauxhall and its escort of two other vehicles had not come for the scenery. Revenge was the only dish on the menu.
Stephen Smith, 24, and his three older brothers, Martin, Niall and Christopher, had come to make good what they saw as a decade of torment inflicted on their community by O’Hare.
Helping them were two others who have not yet been identified but are thought to have been driving a BMW 3 series and a Rover 200.
Perhaps the gang meant to deliver nothing more than a chilling warning to O’Hare, a convicted paedophile. According to that theory, an intended beating spiralled wildly out of control.
The alternative is far more sinister: the gang came with nothing short of killing in mind.
Only those present know which it is. And so far, none are saying. Ten years ago, Thomas O’Hare lived with his parents, Benny and Margaret, three doors down from the Smiths’ council home in Cladymore, a few miles away across Armagh’s rolling hills.
He had ample opportunity to watch the comings and goings of local children as they played innocently, riding their bikes and kicking ball.
It was with a gleaming new bicycle that O’Hare lured one local child into an isolated field to be subjected to sexual abuse.
The victim, whom we have chosen not to identify, was close to the Smith family. O’Hare was prosecuted and found guilty but within little more than a decade, he had served his time in jail and been removed from the sex offenders’ register.
Depending on the seriousness of the crime involved, convicted sex offenders are removed from the register after between two and 10 years.
As far as the law was concerned, Thomas O’Hare – a distant relative of local SDLP councillor Sharon Haughey – was a free man.
Officially, at least, the slate had been wiped clean.
In reality, though, the wounds inflicted when a child is abused are never erased so easily, especially when the perpetrator is free to go about his business in the community, a living, breathing reminder of the horrors visited upon a local child.
Neighbours in Cladymore could not forgive and had twice hounded O’Hare out of the area.
Recently, they had warned him away from the local playground. Shunned by his own community, he had been living in Portadown but had recently inherited the Foley Road house from an uncle.
Perhaps there, he felt safe. There are few houses in the area and locals may not have known of his past.
Perhaps other reasons attracted him to the spot. The local primary school is just a short distance away and teachers there were most likely unaware he was a paedophile.
Now though, the whole country knows of O’Hare and the agonising circumstances of his death and that of his innocent girlfriend, Lisa McClatchey, 21.
It is not clear whether the Smiths planned their actions in any detail. It is known the four brothers attended a funeral in the nearby town of Keady on the day of the attack.
Mourning the loss of their grandmother’s sister, they are all said to have been drinking considerably throughout the day.
That evening, in an apparently spontaneous move, they drove out to Foley Road in the Vauxhall, borrowed earlier that day from an Omagh second-hand car dealer.
The dealer said he believed the vehicle would be used to transport building materials. Instead, descending from the Vauxhall and the other cars, the six masked gang members burst into O’Hare’s home, battering down the front door.
From the injuries sustained by the two victims, police believe a sledge hammer and a claw hammer were used to subdue them.
It is also understood that the attackers made a crude attempt to tie up O’Hare while dousing him and the rest of the house in petrol.
The fuel was then ignited, turning the house into a roaring fireball before the gang fled the scene towards a hilltop some miles away.
There has been speculation that the attackers did not intend the inferno – that it was sparked by a smashed lamp or lit cigarette.
As the Vauxhall and the other cars sped away, Lisa McClatchey, managed to break free. Screaming in agony, with her clothes and hair alight, she made it across the road to a neighbour’s house.
O’Hare, too, made it outside and was found writhing in agony, a human bonfire in the front garden.
His legs bore extensive injuries from the beating and all his teeth had been knocked out.
O’Hare and Miss McClatchey were rushed to the burns unit at Belfast’s Royal Victoria Hospital.
But with 80pc burns, they were never expected to make it.
O’Hare eventually died on Friday, November 10. Lisa held on against all the odds until the early hours of last Wednesday morning, her distraught family by her side.
As firefighters raced towards the Foley Road house and ambulances sped away, the Smiths were heading for a local vantage point, Carrigatuke Mountain, with its commanding views over Tassagh.
But something went horribly wrong. In an ironic twist of fate, all four brothers were set alight in or beside the Vauxhall.
Not realising that their clothes had been doused during the attack, one may have lit a cigarette, immediately turning the vehicle into a fireball. Another theory is that the gang decided to torch the vehicle close to Loughran’s Quarry, inadvertently setting themselves on fire in the process.
Either way, their two accomplices rushed them over the border to Louth County Hospital in Dundalk where they stumbled into A&E just an hour after the initial attack.
All four were subsequently transferred to the specialist burns unit of St James’s Hospital in Dublin where they continue to be treated for 35-55pc burns.
Two of the brothers are described as critical while one is said to have been anointed by a priest twice, so extensive are his injuries.
The brothers are among just six people who know exactly what happened that night but police have been unable to interview them because of their injuries.
They may never reveal the truth but they will forever be branded by the scars of their extensive burns.
Locals in Cladymore were not prepared to speak of the Smith brothers, all of whom are renowned as tough GAA players for Clady, the local team. The area is a tightknit GAA community that revolves around drinking in the club bar.
Two of the brothers, Christopher and Stephen, are joiners and had been working in Dublin.
Christopher lives with his girlfriend, Celine, while Stephen lives with his partner, Shauna, and her baby, Finn.
Niall Smith, 32, is an accountant at the top of his profession. Martin’s occupation is not known.
O’Hare, who was separated from his wife and has two children, is understood to have been unemployed most of his life, unable to find work because of his presence on the sex offenders’ register.
Many, though, are puzzled as to why Lisa McClatchey – a Protestant from a prominent Portadown Orange Order family – was involved with O’Hare, a convicted paedophile from a republican hotbed.
Of all those caught up in events that night, Lisa’s fate appears the most tragic.
Educated at Millington Primary School and Craigavon Senior High School, she appears to have been a well-respected member of the Portadown community.
The middle of three sisters, Lisa was the daughter of Keith and Eva McClatchey, though the parents separated some time ago.
Keith McClatchey, who is now married to the daughter of a former Portadown Orange Order grand master, Harold Gracey, has worked for Craigavon Council for 26 years.
The Reverend Colm McNeely, of Portadown’s Thomas Street Methodist Church, said Lisa McClatchey had been a member of the Girls’ Brigade since childhood.
Just three weeks ago, she had been commissioned as an officer in the Brigade. ‘Lisa was a very active and very energetic young girl. She was very popular and will be sadly missed,’ he said, adding that her brigade colleagues had been devastated at their weekly meeting on Tuesday.
‘I just explained to the girls that Lisa was very seriously ill and I encouraged them to remember her as she was,’ he said.
At the scene of the tragedy, two already dying bunches of flowers have been placed on the concrete gate pillar, held down by a paving stone to stop them blowing away.
Piles of charred personal belongings and household goods lie outside each broken window, where firemen left them. The only recognisable item is a heat- distorted office swivel chair.
Inside, every wall is coated with soot, the intensity of the heat so great that layers of paper and paint have peeled off the plaster.
Outside on the clothes line, two of Lisa’s pullovers still hang, poignant and desolate, where she left them to dry almost two short weeks ago.
