THE trial of a man accused of murdering Timmy Hourihane from Kilcrohane moved into its closing stages on Wednesday.
The jury must deliberate if James Brady, 28, of Shannon Lawn, Mayfield, Cork, is guilty of the murder of Hourihane in a field off Mardyke Walk on October 13th, 2019.
Timmy, a father-of-one, was brought to hospital where he died shortly following an assault which saw him ‘kicked and punched’ resulting in serious injuries.
He had previously worked as a chef and had been living as homeless at the time of his death alongside Brady and others in a so-called tented village at Mardyke Walk.
Brady has pleaded not guilty to the murder and has insisted that he had tried to stop the savage beating. Another man, who is also charged with the murder, is due to stand trial at a later date. He cannot be named by order of the court.
Closing the prosecution’s case, barrister Siobhan Lankford said she wanted to focus the jury’s attention on ‘three big lies’ she alleged were told by the defendant in his interviews with gardaí. She said one of these was his recollection of events when Brady arrived back from a food run in the minutes leading up to the attack.
He had told gardaí that when he arrived back at the camp, he had been chatting to the unnamed man.
‘He said they were drinking and having the chats,’ Ms Lankford continued, adding that Timmy Hourihane then came over to them in his version of events, and began to mess and joke with Brady before a scuffle broke out with the unnamed man after about 10 minutes. This led to the brutal killing, Brady had said. ‘(Unnamed man) attacked him (Timmy) because he was coming onto me,’ Lankford recounted from Brady’s statement.
But the prosecutor said this could not have been the case, as CCTV footage showed very little time had passed between Brady’s return to the camp and the eventual killing. Ms Lankford said the accused ‘realised at some point’ that there were issues with that voluntary statement to gardaí, leading to changes being made when he was interviewed a second time by a specialist garda.
In it, he said a woman, who also cannot be named for legal reasons, was also part of the group chatting at the camp around midnight in the lead-up to the killing.
The woman, who gave evidence in court, ‘remembers none of this,’ Ms Lankford added. She said there were also alterations in Mr Brady’s account of where the attack took place.
The ‘second big lie’ is the accused’s ‘constant refrain that he never touched Mr Hourihane’. Ms Lankford said there are three eye witnesses who told gardaí that they had seen Mr Brady kicking Mr Hourihane. She also pointed to forensic evidence which showed that the victim’s blood had been found on the inside of the tongue of Mr Brady’s right runner, while wet blood was also found on his right arm.
Another lie, she claimed, was that James Brady admitted to gardaí that he had spoken to one of the figureheads in the camp about Timmy Hourihane. At time of going to press, the trial was continuing.
