BY EOGHAN DALTON
A MAN accused of murdering Timmy Hourihane from Kilcrohane has told a court that he witnessed another man ‘dancing on his head’ during a frenzied attack.
James Brady said he had tried to pull the man off the victim during the violent incident on October 13th, 2019.
Despite this, he said, the attack continued on Timmy Hourihane who died from his injuries in the hours following the attack.
Brady, 28, of Shannon Lawn, Mayfield, Cork, has pleaded not guilty to the murder.
Both men were homeless at the time and had been living in a so-called tented village at Mardyke Walk and Brady told the jury at the Central Criminal Court that he and the deceased had been ‘very close’ for several years.
The other man who Brady maintains killed Hourihane is also charged with the chef’s murder.
He will stand trial at a later date and cannot be named for legal reasons.
Brady credited Hourihane as being ‘very good’ to him, having both attended an addiction treatment facility in Blarney for many months prior.
He said he did not care that Hourihane was gay, and said the older man used to tease Brady and tell him he was good looking, but he described it as a joke between the two of them.
‘We fell out from time to time,’ he told gardaí, however they would patch things up shortly afterwards. He told gardaí in a specialist interview shown to the jury that Hourihane had found him a job when he was training as a chef around eight years earlier, and the two later lived in a squat together.
When asked if they had been in a sexual relatonship with each other, he said no.
The video recording of the interview showed the accused demonstrating the attack on the chef, which he maintains he had no part of.
Brady could be seen stamping on a carton in the footage, telling the garda that this was done by the unnamed man, while Brady and a woman tried to pull him off Hourihane. He said Hourihane had come to his tent on the night of the killing and started stroking his face, telling him he was ‘gorgeous’, but added that the two were just joking with each other.
However, he claimed this caused disharmony with the unnamed man who ‘seemed to get very angry the way Timmy and I were connecting.’
‘Timmy started rubbing my face, I’d push him off, it was just the way we were,’ he said. ‘He was just going on as normal, and bang: he got a slap.’
Brady alleged to Det Sgt John O’Connell that the unnamed man then stamped on Hourihane repeatedly.
He said he could hear Hourihane groaning on the ground from the attack, as the man ‘danced on his head’ and called the victim a ‘gay bastard’.
He told gardaí that the unnamed man had struck Hourihane ‘straight down on his head with his left leg.’ In total there were ‘20 or 25 kicks in a short time’, according to Brady.
Brady said Hourihane had left the camp after the death of his aunt to attend the funeral. There had been an argument at the camp where the other man accused of his murder, had said there should be ‘no gays around here’ at the camp.
When Hourihane returned just days before his death, he ‘was full of life as he always was’, Brady said.
‘I gave him a can, (unnamed man) didn’t like that. (Unnamed man) thought he had ran him out of the place before that.’ Moments before the fatal assault, Brady said that ‘out of nowhere Timmy said to (unnamed man) “You’re looking gorgeous”.’
The man ‘snapped’ and punched Hourihane, knocking him to the ground, Brady said in the recorded interview.
The trial contines.
