'Friends say part of Padraig Nally died 20 years ago - that terrible afternoon shattered his serenity'

Half-crazed by terror, worn down by a sequence of break-ins at his isolated farm, the slightest dead of night sound cast a jolting shock of fear down Padraig Nally's body.

Emaciated by anxiety, the Mayo bachelor would spend hour after lonely, frightened, sleepless hour sitting in his shed, his antennae raised and on high alert, consumed by an intense foreboding, with only the shotgun at his side for company or reassurance.

Alone, isolation and paranoia feeding his insomnia, the 60-year-old was - in his own subsequent words - "out of my mind for those lads calling to my house all year."

READ MORE: Farmer Padraig Nally - who faced trial over shooting of John 'Frog' Ward - passes away aged 81

It was October 2004 and rural Ireland, feeling unprotected and vulnerable, was a place of shrivelling confidence, quaking in its mucky work boots, a handmaid to dread. Because so little has changed, it might just as easily have been October 2024.

Hardly a week seemed to pass without the media reporting another violent burglary down some usually quiet lane, justice apparently impotent against the faceless interlopers who rapaciously thieved money, machinery and, worst of all, peace of mind.

Because peace of mind, once stolen, is notoriously difficult to rediscover. Many of the victims were easy targets for calculating predators: An elderly social demographic, often living remotely and alone, many miles from the nearest Garda station, their daily existence unfolding well out of earshot of any other human being.

The closure of rural pubs - an emerging story then, an epidemic now, one which prompted beseeching pleas for assistance outside Dail Eireann this week - added to the sense that the social contract was veering ever closer to dystopian breakdown.

To live down these bucolic byways was to know the 24/7 unease of a gazelle on the Serengeti, sensing the bloodthirsty jungle cats were lurking in the grassy shadows. Nally's existence had been reduced to the narrow dimensions of permanent stress. He would convulse in frightened tears each Sunday night as his sister, having visited for the weekend, returned to her life in Ballina.

Leaving him with just the darkness to whisper in his ear.

Twenty years ago this week Nally shot dead John 'Frog' Ward, a 43-year-old criminal with approximately 80 convictions, whom he had discovered trespassing at his home.

For fully the next 26 months, the story was front-page news, a constant national talking-point on radio phone-ins and TV panel shows, triggering impassioned debate and offering a snapshot into the lived existence of forgotten communities.

With rural Ireland remaining a largely ignored 2024 afterthought, with the closure of so many provincial Garda stations and post offices isolating great swathes of the countryside, with witching hour break-ins continuing to fuel a runaway epidemic of fear, this story is as relevant and important today as it was then.

Weeks away from a General Election, these sparsely populated parishes continue to feel abandoned and besieged by a debilitating need to look anxiously over their shoulder.

Wandering who might come calling in the dead of night. There was outrage in November 2005 when Nally was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to six years imprisonment.

His supporters presented an argument which gained enormous traction across the land.

Was a man not permitted to defend his own castle, or, in this case, a country dwelling in the townland of Cross, County Mayo that he had worked so hard to make viable?

How, in a fair society, could it be legitimate to place behind bars, an individual who had acted out of terror when finding somebody behaving suspiciously on his property?

During his stay in Portlaoise Prison, Nally received somewhere in the region of 10,000 letters and cards of support. Ward, a member of the Travelling community, had convictions for burglary and larceny. At the time of his death, he was facing charges for attacking gardai with a slash hook.

His representatives argued that excess violence had been used, that, after an initial gunshot to the victim's hip and a violent struggle, Nally had reloaded and fired a fatal shot to Ward's back.

As emotions around the story intensified, the Mayo farmer's conviction was quashed. A December 2006 retrial found him not guilty of manslaughter.

Two decades on, the story continues to resonate. Sudden noises in the night terrorise rural Ireland now as they did then.

Talk to those in any village or boreen in any corner of the country and you will hear the same stories: The night-time dread, the sense of helplessness, the bone-deep terror when you wake to approaching car headlights easing down your isolated lane.

The suffocating sense that, if anything bad happens, you are entirely on your own. Those of us who have loved ones living in provincial solitude, places where garda stations were shuttered in acts of myopic, cost-cutting insanity, hear daily updates of behaviour that ranges from anti-social to serenity-stealing intimidation.

Rampaging gangs, often speeding up and down the national motorway network in high-powered cars while the country sleeps, then detouring into the heartland to visit havoc on some village or townland, can seem to act with something close to impunity.

It is one of the authentic scandals of modern Ireland that fear is a constant companion for so many law-abiding, older citizens. That their golden years are thieved by apprehension and violent nightmares.

That, in a country awash with exchequer funds, police stations remain abandoned. That there are is a glaring absence of meaningful government support for the town and village and crossroads pubs that offered a sanctuary, a few hours of company, for those who are lonely and scared and craving the companionship of friendly voices.

I could offer a dozen times a dozen more examples. Many of you will be familiar with a friend, neighbour or blood relative who has been treated like roadkill by these savages.

While law enforcement has had some success against the gangs, prolific offenders, with their brazen contempt for their pursuers, seem to laugh at authority.

Very often the guards know exactly who is responsible, but so high is the burden of proof and so miniscule the available resources to the forces of law and order, that the mobs swagger around with a sense that they are untouchable.

Knowing that, despite their ostentatious lifestyle and designer gear, they can avail of free legal aid financed by the law-abiding tax payer and, benefit from bail laws that can very often feel like an official two-fingers to the law-abiding victims.

For those at the eye of the storm, it can seem as if justice is skewed towards the rights of the offender, with the victim no more than an ill-considered afterthought.

Padraig Nally is now in his 80s, but friends say part of him died that terrible afternoon 20 years ago, that those awful events shattered anything that was left of his serenity.

A man now living half a life, like so many who lie awake in Irish rural beds awaiting the sound that might signal the end of everything that makes their existence worthwhile.

This piece was originally published on the 20th anniversary of the shooting of John 'Frog' Ward