Mína Bean Uí Chribín has died.

We will refrain from singing “Ding dong”.

But boy, was she Mena.

Background: Mena Cribben Of Santry (ComeHereToMe)

From the archives:

THE right-wing Catholic organisation led by Mena Bean Ui Chribin is suspected of funding a legal action to stop the State from taking six neglected children into care.

Four years later, when gardai began investigating claims of incest and cruelty at the “house of horrors” in Roscommon, Bean Ui Chribin was on the phone within a week to talk to the investigating officer about the case.

However, the hard-line Catholic campaigner against all things liberal was given short shrift by the officer in charge, Gda Sgt John Hynes. “He told her that he had nothing to say, that this was a criminal investigation, do not interfere,” said a source close to the investigation.

The repugnant crimes endured by the children at their family home in a Roscommon village were revealed last week when their mother was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment on charges of incest, sexual assault and neglect. Roscommon Circuit Court heard how the children lived in a squalid, freezing home, overrun with mice and rats.

They were rarely fed or washed, and were bullied at school because they were smelly and infested with lice and fleas. One child described how lice crawled down her face. When drunk, their mother forced one of her sons to have sex with her.

The role of Bean Ui Chribin, now a post-mistress in Santry, Dublin, would have been a bit part in an appalling tragedy but for the fact that by helping their mother take court action to keep her children eight years ago, the children were condemned to another four years of cruelty, inflicted on them under the noses of health workers who politely sipped tea in their front room.

Ultra-Catholics Under Fire Over Horror House (Maeve Sheehan, Sunday Independent, January 25, 2009)