[2][3] She lived in the mainly loyalist Rathcoole area of Newtownabbey before her family were forced out of their home, when they moved to republican West Belfast.
[5] Her husband was Michael McKevitt, the Quartermaster General of the Provisional IRA and later a founding member of an anti-Good Friday Agreement splinter group commonly known as the Real Irish Republican Army.
[6] Following the Omagh bombing, Sands McKevitt received hostile messages while running her t-shirt printing business in Dundalk, which traumatised her and led to her calling a local priest.
[7] The locals forced her and her husband out of the business, though both of them strongly denied having anything to do with the attack in Omagh (in June 2009, McKevitt was one of four men found by a civil court to be liable for the bombing in a case taken by relatives of the victims[8]).
In 2003, McKevitt was sentenced to twenty years in prison in the Republic of Ireland, under the Offences Against the State Act,[10] being released early in 2016.