{"id":528881,"date":"2026-07-02T06:40:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-02T06:40:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/528881\/"},"modified":"2026-07-02T06:40:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T06:40:10","slug":"mother-of-parnell-square-attack-victim-does-not-feel-anger-towards-bouchaker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/528881\/","title":{"rendered":"Mother of Parnell Square attack victim \u2018does not feel anger\u2019 towards Bouchaker"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The mother of a little girl seriously injured in a knife attack on Parnell Square in November 2023 has said she does not feel anger towards Riad Bouchaker.<\/p>\n<p>The 52-year-old was <a href=\"https:\/\/www.breakingnews.ie\/ireland\/riad-bouchaker-found-guilty-of-attempted-murder-of-children-at-parnell-square-1921060.html\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">convicted at the Central Criminal Court<\/a> in Dublin on Wednesday of eight charges in relation to the attack, including the attempted murder of the then five-year-old girl who was stabbed in the heart.<\/p>\n<p>He had denied all eight charges.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking to Sky News, the mother of the girl, who can not be identified for legal reasons, said she does not feel anger towards Bouchaker as it would not \u201cchange anything\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Describing the day of the attack, she said she received a call from her daughter\u2019s after-school care telling her she had been stabbed.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI remember blood being drained from my whole body, like, like I was about to pass out,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p>She sprinted from her workplace to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.breakingnews.ie\/ireland\/we-are-not-savages-the-full-story-of-the-parnell-square-attack-1921107.html\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Parnell Square<\/a> where she found her daughter on the floor, surrounded by people trying to resuscitate her, an image she said is \u201cburned in my memory\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>She and doctors thought her daughter would not survive the attack.<\/p>\n<p>The girl has a lifelong, life-limiting severe disability after her brain was deprived of oxygen for 40 minutes following the attack.<\/p>\n<p>She is non-verbal and can only communicate by blinking, uses a wheelchair and has to be fed through a tube in her stomach as she cannot swallow safely by herself.<\/p>\n<p>The girl, now seven, has no memory of the attack and her mother said explaining what had happened to her was \u201cprobably one of the hardest things that I had to do\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>She added: \u201cI just said that she got hurt, and that\u2019s why she couldn\u2019t move the way that she used to, or that she wanted to, or she couldn\u2019t speak to us the way that she wanted to, or that she used to.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Asked by reporter Stephen Murphy if she could \u201cever forgive\u201d Bouchaker, she said: \u201cI think that he has to forgive himself first.<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"not-prose no-underline\" data-action=\"click\" data-category=\"Read more article clicked\" data-label=\"https:\/\/www.breakingnews.ie\/ireland\/we-are-not-savages-the-full-story-of-the-parnell-square-attack-1921107.html\" data-value=\"1\" href=\"https:\/\/www.breakingnews.ie\/ireland\/we-are-not-savages-the-full-story-of-the-parnell-square-attack-1921107.html\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><\/p>\n<p>        <img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/pa-74684113-e1782923356567.jpg\" class=\"rounded-sm object-contain bg-transparent z-10 w-full h-full not-prose\" alt=\"'We Are Not Savages': The Full Story Of The Parnell Square Attack\" width=\"278\" height=\"156\" \/><\/p>\n<p>        Ireland<\/p>\n<p>&#8216;We are not savages&#8217;: The full story of the Parnell Square attack<\/p>\n<p><\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u201cRight, by now I don\u2019t know what she would be like as a five-year-old or as a six-year-old if she had progressed the natural way, and he stole that from her.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTo be honest, I don\u2019t know if he even understands what he did,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s anything to forgive, because I don\u2019t think that anybody in their right state of mind would have done that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The mother of a little girl seriously injured in a knife attack on Parnell Square in November 2023&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":528882,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,60,43],"class_list":["post-528881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=528881"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528881\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/528882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=528881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=528881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=528881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}