You would think that a family member being murdered is as traumatic as it gets, but it turns out its aftermath can be just as devastating.

That is what the French family have learnt in the seven years since Valerie French was killed by her husband, James Kilroy, on a summer night in June 2019 while their three young children slept nearby, unaware that the world they knew had irrevocably changed forever.

The killing itself was unspeakably brutal. But what followed, says Valerie’s brother David, was another kind of violence entirely – a slow, grinding collision with a system that left the family powerless at the precise moment they most needed protection.

There were legal loopholes, bureaucratic absurdities and repeated indignities, all while the children Valerie adored remained tethered – at least in the eyes of the State – to the man convicted of killing their mother.

It’s resulted in the French family having to continuously fight for access to Valerie’s children.

David, who wrote the heartbreaking memoir For Valerie, says that Tusla allows him to see his nephews just four times a year.

‘If I go and deliver Easter eggs, for example, that’s one of the French family visits gone, and there’s 13 of us,’ he says quietly today. ‘The system as it stands centres [Kilroy] and everyone else is almost excluded. It’s Alice In Wonderland stuff.’

Last week, after years of campaigning, there was at least one moment of vindication. The Government secured Cabinet approval for the drafting of the Guardianship of Infants (Amendment) Bill 2026 – known publicly as Valerie’s Law – which is legislation designed to address the extraordinary legal anomaly whereby a parent convicted of murdering their partner can still retain guardianship rights over their children.

For David, it marks progress. It’s a start for families who find themselves in a similarly unthinkable situation – having lost their loved one so brutally and then faced with navigating the legal quagmire that follows, most notably in challenges surrounding the children left behind.

‘It’s a step towards saying we are prioritising the child here,’ he says, realistic about the scale of reform still needed in this very grey area.

Valerie’s Law is only one recommendation among hundreds arising from reviews into domestic and familial violence, says David, who is an engineering software manager by profession, with an analytical intelligence.

He’s in the work of solving problems, so his week’s news offers some logic, a chink of light in a legal labyrinth that has done nothing but compound the trauma of Valerie’s death.

‘The killer kind of gets prioritised by default,’ he says. ‘So the only way to start fixing the system is to take him out of the room.

‘When it comes to what happened to our family, the legal system as it stands doesn’t have a template for how to deal with it. So it’s like the murder happens on a different planet – that’s criminal court – and here the family law space is different.

‘[Kilroy] was able to block a lot of things because of his guardianship powers – like they can’t get passports without his say. So for instance, that blocked them living with some of our family who live abroad, the people who should be minding them. And he’s been completely within his legal rights to do so.’

David says that Valerie’s Law is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to dealing with the complexities of family law probate in such devastating consequences.

He has spent the past year meeting with other bereaved families, NGOs and officials through Department of Justice working groups, examining domestic homicide responses.

Again and again, he says, the same themes emerge – isolation, confusion, financial chaos and a legal system that fails to grasp the reality of what murder leaves behind in a family.

‘There’s a ton of reforms needed,’ he says. ‘Can legislation even move fast enough to keep up with society? That’s the bigger question.’

For example, the law in Ireland stops people from inheriting assets from someone they have killed, but it does not prevent them from inheriting joint assets, such as co-owned property – so Kilroy will legally be able to move back into the home he jointly owned with Valerie following his release from Castlerea Prison.

David has had to battle in court twice to become executor of Valerie’s estate, to make sure the boys have some sort of financial future.

‘There’s a report that will come out of Valerie’s Law and I hope some structures that can help other families through this, because nothing is signposted for you when this happens,’ he says.

‘There’s not much in Ireland by means of support. Take Northern Ireland, in contrast, there’s peer support groups for families affected by domestic homicide, that stuff doesn’t get imported into the system here. There’s this sense maybe that we are still living in holy Catholic Ireland, and this bad stuff doesn’t happen. But I’m sorry to say that it does.

‘You don’t know about compensation schemes or parole boards or legal deadlines. Every family discovers this stuff by accident.

‘It turns into a full-time job, and always another facet will come up that you haven’t considered,’ he says.

‘Like one of the other families said, “you know that Valerie’s pension will go to him unless you stop it?” And it’s just something that seems to evade sensibility, after what he did, but the onus is on the family to figure all this stuff out. The killer would get his mortgage paid off unless there’s someone who will actually try to stop it, and the State won’t do it. So if Valerie was an only child, [Kilroy] would actually benefit massively financially, because there’d be no one out there trying to work in the boys’ interest. They’d have zero assets otherwise.

‘The law treats him as if he’d stolen a car,’ David says. ‘Like he’s still Daddy James.’

He’s deeply critical of a system he believes prioritises family reunification over all else – even in cases of domestic homicide.

‘The normal template is rehabilitate him and put the family back together and support him in his parenting duties,’ he says. ‘For five years before the verdict, we couldn’t say a word in public for fear of upsetting the trial and we were doubting ourselves, wondering if we were the ones who think this is absolutely nonsensical.

‘That family is done – he’s killed the mother. There is no family to put back together.’

David does not hide his contempt for his former brother-in-law, which is unsurprising. Not once has Kilroy, who worked as a park ranger, publicly shown remorse for his heinous act – if anything, quite the opposite.

He initially pleaded not guilty to causing Valerie’s death by stabbing and strangulation by reason of insanity caused by cannabis-induced psychosis. Following the collapse of two trials in 2023, a third trial held in July 2024 finally convicted him of murder.

‘Kilroy liked the kind of action man image, and he liked his toys, his gear,’ reminisces David. ‘He was kind of socially awkward. A lot of these guys don’t fit the profile of a killer. I think Valerie fell for that aspect of Kilroy, who was sorry for himself. We never really understood why she did.

‘According to gardaí in court, he told them that she gave good kicks and all of that stuff. He boasted that he was a stone cold killer. [Her death] was brutal, and the fight wasn’t quick. She fought for her life. She knew she was being attacked and what was coming for her.’

Her final reported words – ‘What about the boys?’ – were hauntingly prescient. The children were discovered hungry and alone by gardaí, her five-year-old dressed in his school uniform, having split a banana between himself and his twin younger brothers while their mother’s body lay nearby in Kilroy’s campervan.

But her words also have meaning today, for a devoted mum robbed of her life at 41 and the joy of seeing her precious children – who are now almost 10 and 13 – grow up.

It is almost impossible to comprehend the loneliness and confusion of that scene – three children waiting for parents who would never return to them in the same way again. It’s almost as difficult again for David to comprehend how the children ended up apart from a loving family after such a tragedy.

‘All of the research says the best outcomes in such a situation are always when the kids are with the victim’s family,’ he says.

‘But they’re doing well. In fairness, they’d be doing better without his right to involvement. But they’re doing well and hopefully it’ll continue into puberty and young teenagers and rebellion, and it all kicks off again.

‘I’m not sure that the system kind of gets that, as it wants to have a happy story. Sorry, but it isn’t.’

To his knowledge, the children haven’t seen Kilroy in jail, but chillingly, it’s not something beyond the realms of possibility.

‘One of the conditions for whoever has the kids is that they need to be prepared to possibly bring them to the father in prison, and also have a non judgmental attitude, and not use words like “murder”,’ he says. ‘It’s effectively designed to give the kids to the killer’s family, who want to bring the kids to see Daddy James.’

The ripple effect of such devastation continues to reverberate through generations. Valerie’s own mother, also called Valerie, died suddenly just six months after her murder, wracked with grief at the loss of her daughter and the worry of what would become of her grandchildren.

‘Some of their cousins are now almost teenagers, so they’re heading into their own little relationships, thinking some marriages end in murder,’ says David, who has three children of his own.

‘They shouldn’t be having those thoughts.

‘She was very hard-working, very much able to be the super-mum, to do all the things,’ he says of Valerie, who would have turned 48 this July.

‘She was passionate about her work as an occupational therapist.’

David recalls how Valerie desperately wanted a family and endured years of IVF treatment and miscarriages, all while keeping their struggles private.

‘She made such an effort to be a mother, dealing with pregnancy losses and IVF treatment,’ he says. ‘She was the main breadwinner so she was paying for all the treatment.’

It was revealed during the trial that the children were conceived through IVF using a sperm donor, something David says Kilroy preferred to keep hidden.

‘They’re not his biological kids, which is a weird wrinkle, and he wanted to keep that quiet, because maybe he’d be afraid to get ribbed down the pub or something like that,’ he observes.

‘The children were everything to her. She didn’t want a lot,’ he says softly. ‘All he had to do was show up.’

Before she became a statistic or a campaign or the name attached to a law – which for women, is always a sign change has come too late for them – she was simply Valerie, David stresses. She was funny, sociable, fiercely competent and deeply caring.

‘She was strong, socially very adept, popular,’ he says. ‘She could rock into a party where she didn’t know anyone and by the end of it she’d be having the chats. She was great fun.

‘I think that’s important for people to realise. You might think something like this couldn’t happen to someone like Valerie. But it can, and it does. It can happen to any woman.’

He’s right. In Ireland, femicide is on the rise and women are most at risk inside their own homes – 186 women and counting have been killed in the last ten years behind their own front doors.

‘It was Drew Harris that said there’s more people getting killed by their husbands than by all the gangland murders put together,’ David says. ‘Everyone knows about the Hutch-Kinahan thing but it’s the James Kilroys that are the problem. It’s women at home being killed by their husbands that we really need to talk about.’

David thinks often about what Valerie would want now, remembering his sister’s determination to solve problems for everyone around her.

‘She was a very positive, upbeat person, she wouldn’t want people to be miserable. And we are doing as much as we can to be in the boys’ lives, because that would have been so important to her,’ says David, who is now looking into becoming a court-appointed guardian. ‘When they’re 18, we’ll still be there and they know that.

So how best to honour his sister now? ‘What’s best for her boys,’ he says. ‘That’s all Valerie would ever have wanted.’