Home destroyed in sectarian attack
BY LAURA FRIEL
``I can't offer you a cup of tea because there is no electricity,''
says Christine Kelly, ``but I've plenty of toast in the kitchen.''
The Catholic mother of two is putting a brave face on it. Her
hands are shaking with the trauma of her family's ordeal but she
can still crack a joke or two.
Inside the kitchen, everything is black and charred, incinerated
in a fire which swept through the back of the Kelly family's
North Belfast home after a petrol bomb was deliberately thrown
into an outside heating oil tank. ``They must have prized off the
cap because I had the tank padlocked,'' says Christine.
Not only is the back kitchen completely destroyed, so are a
downstairs living room, upstairs bathroom, a back bedroom and
third storey attic room. Christine shows me around each of the
rooms, the family's possessions lie blackened and ruined. ``At
least no one was killed,'' says Christine.
Just before the attack, Christine had called her elder son,
16-year-old Joseph out of the back living room where he had been
playing computer games. ``I keep the children away from the back
of the house when ever I think there might be any trouble,'' says
Christine.
Christine was standing outside her front door talking to a
neighbour when the loyalists attack her home shortly after 9pm.
Her younger son ran from the house and alerted Christine to the
attack. ``A few hours later when we would have been asleep,'' says
Christine, ``and none of us would have survived.''
The fire from the ignited oil tank was so intense two of
Christine's neighbours' homes were also badly damaged.
Michael Crangle and his wife were at home when the blaze ripped
through the roof and down through the ceiling of their bathroom
leaving the room gutted and the rest of the house smoke damaged.
Margaret Goodall, whose home was also damaged in the fire, says
the ordeal has intensified the trauma of her 22-year-old
daughter, who is recovering from a loyalist gun attack at her
place of work earlier this summer.
``We live in a constant state of fear here,'' says Christine. ``We
have fire extinguishers in every room and at night we're too
afraid to draw attention to the house by putting on a light. We
creep about here in semi darkness.''
Christine's Newington home is owner occupied, so she has little
hope of ever moving away. ``I've sent my children to live with
relatives for the time being,'' she says, ``but in the end we've
nowhere else to go.''
![[An Phoblacht]](http://republican-news.org/graphics/title_gifs/aprn.gif)