The following is an extract from the new book, ’Who Killed Una Lynskey?’ by journalist and broadcaster, Mick Clifford.
In October, 1971, 19-year-old Una Lynskey vanished near her home in Co. Meath. In the weeks that followed, gardaí identified three young local men as suspects, on shaky evidence: Martin Conmey, Dick Donnelly and Marty Kerrigan.
Martin Conmey would go on to serve three years in prison for manslaughter. Marty Kerrigan was beaten to death by members of Una’s family, within days of her body being found.
The below extract details the three men’s experience of Garda questioning in 1971 and the hostility that tore apart their local community in the aftermath.
In 2014, the State would issue a certificate of Miscarriage of Justice to Martin Conmey, and later after High Court action, a public apology.
THERE WAS CONFUSION outside Trim garda station when the three men were being released on the evening of 27 October. Martin Conmey emerged from the station first, walking out into the darkness of a late-autumn evening.
His father was waiting for him with the family car. Dick Donnelly and Marty Kerrigan were let out around the same time, but a garda approached them and engaged in further conversation in the yard attached to the station.
Dick asked for the keys of his car but was told it was being held as evidence. While they were talking, Martin Conmey’s father drove past, not having seen Martin’s friends. Donnelly and Kerrigan now had no way home, and the gardaí weren’t offering a lift.
‘You’ll get a lift yourself,’ one of the gardaí said, and walked back into the station.
‘They were told to go home through the fields,’ Ann Kerrigan remembers. ‘They were told the Lynskeys were on the way with a gun and somebody was going to get shot.’
Dick and Marty set out on the 18-mile journey home, initially through the streets of Trim, which had closed down for the evening. They had barely slept during their time in custody. They were exhausted, sore and hungry as they made their way through the outskirts of Trim and on to the dark roads beyond the town.
They were also well aware that their lives had changed utterly. In everything but name they were the prime suspects in the missing persons case of their neighbour, Una Lynskey. As members of the gardaí had intimated, and as they knew well themselves, Una’s family would not take well to the notion that neighbours were responsible for her disappearance. Their detention in Trim had made the three friends marked men.
Donnelly and Kerrigan kept walking, tensing each time the headlights of a car and the low hum of an approaching motor appeared out of the darkness. They stood in against the ditches. A couple of times instinct prompted them to climb over a ditch into a field out of sight in case the approaching car was bringing violence. Around halfway along their journey, a neighbour, Tommy O’Neill, spotted them on the road and stopped. At first, they advanced cautiously towards the red rear lights, the exhaust pipe’s idling fumes. Then Dick spotted O’Neill behind the wheel. At last, this epilogue to their nightmare was coming to an end.
Back at Kerrigans’, the two men were duly fussed over. According to Ann Kerrigan, Marty took off his shirt and showed bruises on his back. A sense of shock pervaded the house.
‘A neighbour came in and Marty got up and bent over. The neighbour asked what’s wrong and Marty said his back was killing him,’ Ann remembers. Then, as the neighbour was getting into his car, there was a sudden loud bang and it took a second for everybody to realise that it was the sound of a gun.
‘It scared the living daylights out of us,’ Ann says.
‘The shot appeared to have come from a field next to our home. We knew it was them. It had to have been them. Who else could it have been?’
The incident was reported to the gardaí the next day.
‘Them’, as far as Ann Kerrigan and her family and friends were concerned, was somebody associated with the Lynskey family. Nobody was ever charged over the incident. The shot was the opening salvo in the events that would tear asunder the close-knit community around Porterstown Lane.
The following morning, when the Kerrigan sisters were leaving to go to work, there was spray paint on the road outside.
‘Murderers,’ it read, and was accompanied by an arrow pointing towards the Kerrigan home.
Later that day, the Evening Herald reported that the gardaí now believed that Una was dead and that her body could have been moved on a couple of occasions by her killers. A major search was to be launched, which would include the garda sub-aqua unit and soldiers seconded from the armed forces. As with the great bulk of media reports at the time, the coverage was sourced from within the garda investigation.
The piece mentioned that three men who had been helping the gardaí with their inquiries had been released the previous evening. ‘Following information received Gardaí yesterday searched ponds and ditches at Rathbeggan on the Dublin– Navan Road but in each case drew a blank. It is thought the search will be successful in the next few days.’
The implication was obvious – these searches were being conducted because of what had been revealed during the interrogations in Trim.
The spokesman was quoted: ‘This is going to be a big search. We feel we are close to finding the body.’
Patrick Lynskey told the paper, ‘We are still praying that Una is alive. It is a terrible strain on the family.’
The day after he was released from Trim, Dick Donnelly’s father brought him to the doctor. John Clarke had a good reputation and practised in the village of Dunsany, 14 kilometres from Ratoath.
His examination found that Donnelly had some serious bruising, consistent with receiving a number of blows.
There were four abrasions on the inside of his left arm, measuring one inch square. On the outside of that arm there was a linear red mark measuring three inches and another beneath it two inches long.
Beneath the left shoulder blade there was an area of bruising fourteen inches long and two inches wide, and there was further bruising in the ribs area, three inches by an inch in area. There was also bruising on the right shoulder, as well as swelling in both ears. Donnelly’s jaw joint was swollen.
The doctor referred him to Navan Hospital for X-rays on the skull, chest and jaw. Asked later in court for his opinion on how the injuries could have come about, he said, ‘As
a result of blows or probably by means of fists, and probably the long red marks on his chest were caused by some long, blunt instrument.’ This would accord with Donnelly’s allegation that Garda Gildea had struck him on the back with a poker.
On the same day, Martin Conmey’s father, David, brought him to a local doctor and then visited Dunshaughlin garda station to complain about the detention in Trim of his son and to insist that his son had absolutely nothing to do with Una Lynskey’s disappearance. Marty Kerrigan’s father Martin did likewise.
In those early days after the detentions in Trim, a sense of foreboding permeated Porterstown Lane. The close-knit nature of the community, the preponderance of young males in the affected families, meant that confrontation was almost inevitable. What followed was a constant, low level of intimidation and threats, with the odd outbreak of violence.
There was aggro when the menfolk on either side met on the lane. There were various skirmishes at dances in the area.
Paintings, which included a depiction of gallows, appeared not just at Marty Kerrigan’s home but also Martin Conmey’s. Naturally, those on the opposite side from the Lynskeys didn’t take things lying down. One night, one of those supporting the Lynskeys was stopped on the lane. A group of youths surrounded his car, conveying threats by their presence as much as anything that was said. The battle lines were drawn repeatedly, with violence always lurking just behind the latest threat.
Some in the community just wanted to keep out of it.
Sean Reilly, whose statement had given the gardaí the premise they required to bring the men to Trim, didn’t want to get involved. His father went up the lane to the Lynskeys and told them that Sean had nothing to do with anything that was going on. The Reillys believed the three young men were innocent, but at the same time they didn’t want to fall out with anyone. Others locally felt the same.
Among the older generation, there were attempts at some form of reconciliation. Martin Kerrigan Snr got word from a sister in England that there was talk in her neighbourhood about a young girl having arrived from Ireland.
‘My father got that letter and he went up to the Lynskeys to tell them,’ Ann Kerrigan says. ‘He was thinking it might be of some help, that it could be followed up to see if it was Una.
He was only in the house a few minutes when a guard showed up and brought him to Dunshaughlin garda station. The Lynskeys just didn’t want to know about it. As far as they were concerned, they knew what had happened Una and who was responsible.’
Mick Clifford is Special Correspondent for the Irish Examiner. He has worked in print and broadcast journalism for over 20 years. He is the author of three non-fiction books, including Bertie Ahern and the Drumcondra Mafia (with Shane Coleman) and A Force for Justice: The Maurice McCabe Story, and two crime novels. His new book, ‘Who killed Una Lynskey’ is out now.
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