Heartless thieves broke into and wrecked a Co. Donegal pub owned by missing toddler Madeleine McCann’s grieving grandmother Eileen McCann.
The thugs smashed their way into the bar in the early hours of St Patrick’s Day – just hours after Eileen paid a farewell visit before returning to the UK after a brief family visit to Co. Donegal.
The break-in happened at a pub in St Johnston leased from Eileen by family friend Joe Peoples.
Thugs rammed a car into the back door and escaped with about €5,000 of booze.
Mr Peoples said: “They cleaned me out of everything that was on the shelves except the Gordon’s gin for some reason.”
The defiant publican quipped: “They must have heard the saying ‘gin makes you thin’. Maybe they don’t want to be thin.”
The crime was committed sometime between midnight on Sunday when the pub was locked up for the night and 8.30 a.m. on St Patrick’s morning when Mr Peoples arrived to reopen it.
He said: “The back door was lying in the yard. There was evidence it had been rammed by a car.”
Neighbouring publicans rallied around and helped him re-stock the bar by 10.30 a.m. on St Patrick’s Day. He said: “To have kept it closed would have been to let the thugs get the better of me and that’s not going to happen.”
Eileen McCann, who inherited the pub premises from her late husband Johnny, was in the area for a few days for his anniversary Mass last Saturday.
She visited the pub shortly after her arrival last Thursday and again before her departure for the UK on Sunday morning when she headed off to Leicester to spend Easter week with her son Gerry and his wife Kate, Madeleine’s parents.
Almost a year ago, a large family group including Madeleine celebrated Easter in The Rosses where Eileen has roots.
Weeks later, three-year-old Madeleine disappeared without a trace during a family holiday in Portugal.