Last Monday night, while having supper in the kitchen of his home at Feale Drive, Listowel, with his wife Catriona, Mr John Costello (42), saw the windows coming in around him.
He shouted to his wife to run for the back door.
"After what happened before, I thought they had come back for revenge. What else could you think?" he asked.
"All the windows were being broken in. We were afraid for our lives. Now, the gardaí say it might not have been a vigilante attack but how were we to know at the time?"
Mr Costello's son John (18), has, by his own admission, smoked an occasional joint and used ecstasy tablets at weekends.
He suffers from depression, for which he is now being treated in hospital but has never dealt drugs, according to his father.
On December 21st last year, two men arrived at their estate home in Listowel. When Mrs Costello opened the front door, she was pushed and shoved and warned that her son "was dead" if he didn't leave Listowel.
"She was terrified and she screamed and the two men ran off," Mr Costello explained. "As they were going, one of them shouted back to her and told her she was too young and too good-looking to be in a coffin.
"Since this happened we have both been on edge and John's depression has worsened. When he leaves hospital in Tralee he will have to go to Kilkenny for special counselling but at least he's out of the way for a while. We're afraid to answer the door at night now.
"I didn't have many friends on the estate before now but now I have none.
No one seems to want to talk to us. Catriona is even afraid walking on the street. I am disabled, suffering from emphysema. We're going to continue living here and we're not going to give in to this.
"Do I think Sinn Féin were involved? Yes I do. Let me put it this way: it was made very plain to me, and I'm not going to say any more than that, that by going public, I had done a lot of damage to Sinn Féin's campaign in Kerry North. That's really all I want to say," Mr Costello added.