A lone farmer, fearing he was under threat from a Traveller, resorted to desperate measures, the Central Criminal Court in Co Mayo heard this week. Kathy Sheridan reports
In the bright, air-conditioned Central Criminal Court in Castlebar this week, where 61-year-old farmer Pádraig Nally is on trial for the murder of John Ward, a 43-year-old Traveller and father of 11, it took a while for public interest to build.
Each day, the victim's widow, Marie Ward, dressed in black, travelled from their Carrowbrowne halting site in Co Galway, accompanied by her son, Tom (18) - who was driving his father on the day of the killing - along with her 14-year-old daughter (her youngest child) and a handful of relatives. They sat along the wall nearest the door.
Pádraig Nally's sister, Maureen (59), a teacher in Ballina, also attended court every day. She sat in the body of the room with a woman friend, and as the week progressed the benches around them steadily filled up with their neighbours and friends.
Until October 14th last year, when he shot John Ward twice and killed him, Pádraig Nally had led a simple life. He still lived in the same house in Funshinagh in which he and Maureen had been born and reared. Funshinagh is a quiet townland framed by the Mayo mountains and a salmon river, near the village of Cross, a few miles from Ashford Castle.
He was educated at Cross National School, where he was held back in third class. At the age of "14 and a bit", while in fourth class, he left school for good, to help on the family farm, feeding stock, milking cows, working on the bog.
Did he socialise, asked his senior defence counsel, Brendan Grehan.
"A little . . . I used go to the pictures in Ashford Castle . . . That was all," Nally said.
While Maureen went on to secondary school in Headfort, and to England for teacher training, he occupied himself with Civil Defence, Macra na Feirme and the Irish Farmers' Association, with occasional forays to Dublin and Co Kerry for protest marches.
Although his parents never learned to drive, he had acquired a tractor and a car by 1971, when he was 27. But until Maureen bought him a mobile last October, he had never owned a phone.
By then, both his parents had died - his mother the last to go in August 1999 - and Maureen had come back to Co Mayo to teach, living first in Ballina, then near Foxford. Neither of the siblings had married and Nally was now living alone in the home place, still heated by turf fires. He was not an ostentatious man. His tractor was second-hand when he bought it in 1988, he told the court. His white Nissan car had a 90D registration.
But he was no recluse. Witnesses spoke of weekly outings to agricultural shows, and marts in Ballinrobe, Maam Cross and Athenry. Maureen said she believed that he went to the marts "as much to mix with people as to follow up prices . . . He didn't seem to like being on his own" since their mother died. He was a fit man, last on medication in 1986, he told detectives, when he was prescribed painkillers after an accident.
BY CONTRAST, ANYTHING the court heard about the victim, John Ward, came from Garda files and psychiatric and forensic reports and the evidence of his son, Tom.
State Pathologist Prof Marie Cassidy said he was about 5ft 8in (1.72m), of moderately heavy build, with receding short brown hair and tattoos on his arms and at the back of his fingers. The toxicology report showed he had opiates, cannabis and tranquillisers in his body when he died. He had two shotgun wounds in his body and had suffered at least 10 blows to the head with "a long, fairly narrow, sturdy implement", as well as blows to a leg and injuries to the neck.
The first gunshot wound to the buttock was "just a flesh injury, though it would have been painful and would have affected his mobility". The head injuries "would have caused no permanent effect beyond linear scars". The second shotgun injury was fatal, penetrating the arm, entering the left lung and damaging the heart - it would have caused rapid collapse.
"The trajectory [ of the shot] suggested that the gunman was above him . . . and that [ the victim] may have been bent over or was crouching down," she said.
Tom Ward, who was with his father on the day he died, told defence counsel that his father "wasn't a fighting man" and that he recalled no incident involving a slash-hook, although there was Garda evidence that he [ Tom] was present at the time of such an incident. He said he had driven 10 to 15 cars in the previous six months, but denied that he switched cars around so that they could not be traced back to him.
Counsel put it to him that he hadn't switched off the car engine while waiting for his father at Nally's house on October 14th, but he said there was nothing strange about that.
"My father got killed and murdered for trying to make a living by selling old cars," he said.
In court yesterday, Dr Sheila O'Sullivan, a consultant psychiatrist at University College Hospital Galway (UCHG), said that John Ward had been an inpatient of hers from September 3rd to September 21st 2004, and had been discharged and referred to the day hospital, but was re-admitted as an emergency on October 1st and remained at the hospital until two days before his death. Her subsequent report noted that he had a history of impulsive aggressive outbursts and auditory hallucinations.
"He was quite frightened and paranoid . . . and was afraid that he would attack before he was attacked," O'Sullivan said.
Dr Dympna Gibbons, a senior registrar at UCHG, said that Ward had been "hearing voices for years . . . that there was a man in his head . . . who had told him to kill himself and his wife. He tried to put those thoughts out of his head . . . He had a difficult temper, a difficulty with anger control. He had been involved in fist-fighting from a young age - bare-knuckle boxing - and had inflicted serious injuries on others."
He had caused a man to turn blue after holding his neck and he thought he had killed him. He threw a cup at another, inflicting a wound which required 18 stitches.
John Ward's 12 separate sets of convictions included a suspended sentence for an incident in which he was stabbed with a Stanley knife. According to Gibbons, he said that "if he met the man who attempted to cut his throat, he would kill him". When he died, Ward was due to answer charges for swinging a slash-hook at gardaí who had called to a site to investigate the theft of a fireplace.
Both doctors agreed with the prosecution that he had been a pleasant man to deal with and was co-operating with medical advice.
"When discharged, he was well settled," said O'Sullivan.
ON THE DAY he killed John Ward, Pádraig Nally had been in the kitchen eating his dinner of bread and tea, listening to Joe Duffy before switching to Galway Bay FM for the news at 2pm, when he heard a car at the door.
Last Thursday, as Nally sat alone on a long bench, facing the jury in an open-necked cream shirt, navy pullover, dark baggy trousers and thick-soled casual shoes, his neighbours took the stand, one after another, to describe him as "an outright gentleman" and "a well-respected man . . . always with a smile and a good salute when you'd meet him on the road". Michael Varley, a neighbouring farmer who had known him all his life, said Nally was "a very kind and honest man . . . He'd be as straight as you'd get. If you asked what did he get for an animal, he'd tell the truth".
The same people also gave evidence of a changing culture and landscape in their part of Co Mayo, of a place where new houses and faces were appearing, where most people had moved to part-time farming, many wives now had jobs "off-farm" and houses might be empty all day.
"Going back three or four years ago, you'd know everybody," said Varley. "But with all the building going on, you wouldn't know who is who now."
They gave evidence of Nally's - and in some cases, their own - increasing sense of insecurity in this changing environment. According to figures given by Sgt James Carroll, the crime rate in the area was no higher than in the rest of the county. But Varley said there had been "a lot of break-ins in the last three years, especially during the day . . . I was personally aware of break-ins".
In the months leading up to the killing of John Ward, both his neighbours and Maureen - who spent every weekend after work with him in Cross - noticed Nally becoming increasingly preoccupied, "agitated and fearful" about his own safety and about protecting his property.
There had been a burglary in February 2001, when plates and blankets were taken. In February last year, a chainsaw had been stolen from the back toilet inside the house, after the door had been kicked in and personal possessions messed around. The gun he always kept beside his bed - an old, neglected-looking single-barrelled shotgun which had belonged to his father - had been kicked out of place and under the bed so that for a time he thought it had been stolen. After that, he moved it outside.
"I was afraid I might be shot in my own bed. I put it down a barrel in the barn and put a bag over it. There was a cartridge in the gun and a few beside it."
Other things were going missing from the farm, he claimed. At different times, these included a heavy towing chain, numerous vice-grips and wrenches and a water-barrel. "After the chainsaw", he told detectives, "they were making a barn of my house."
At 2.30am one morning, he said, the dogs started barking and he heard the latch being lifted on the back door and then the sound of a car going away.
He began to note down the registration numbers of strange cars.
"He'd have the car numbers ready when you'd pull up. They were written all over the house," said another neighbour, Martin Mellett. In court, the exhibits included a pedigree bull catalogue with the registration 99CE499 written on a page. This car was sighted twice in the area, once by both Nally and Joe Concannon, a friend of his, when it entered Nally's yard at speed and a few weeks later, 1.5km away, by Concannon.
"When I took up a paper on the Sunday after the accident", said Concannon, "I was able to identify Mr John Ward as one of the men [in the car]."
There was evidence that the number plates were false and had belonged to a Peugeot that had been involved in an accident in Co Tipperary, then taken to a breakers' yard outside Limerick, from where the plate had disappeared.
A COUPLE OF WEEKS before the killing, Nally said that the "same men" were at his house in a black Ford, asking for directions to the lake. He claimed that these were the same men - John and Tom Ward - that he saw again in his yard last October. According to defence counsel Grehan, the accused believed that Ward had "came over and back the road four or five times".
In a soft-spoken voice, Nally said repeatedly that he was continually afraid "that someone would come in the night and break me up". He claimed that people were calling to the house "when I'd be gone. I'd throw a bucket of water [ in the dry clay] at the gate so I'd get footprints". He said that he wasn't sleeping at night, and was "all the time rushing home, wanting to be at the house in case anybody called". He told detectives that for several months he had taken to sitting in the shed with the gun for five hours, usually on a Thursday. The farm was neglected and he was sleeping for only a few hours a night. The turf wasn't being brought home or the sheep sheared. The weekend before the killing, after Maureen left to return home, he cried, he said.
"I felt that something was going to happen," he said. "If it didn't, I'd have to shoot myself the following weekend. The pressure had got to me."
Yesterday, Nally said he was sorry for what he had done, and later, under cross-examination by Paul O'Higgins for the prosecution, said that he "knew by the look of that man on the last Saturday of September that he would come back to kill me". O'Higgins said: "You told Sgt Carroll that you decided to kill him because you couldn't lie with it any more, 'the way they were tolerating' you." Nally replied: "That is certainly correct . . . They broke into my house on several occasions".
The trial resumes on Tuesday for closing statements and Mr Justice Carney's direction to the jury.