ONE OF TWO brothers accused of the murder of Michael Mulvey, who died two weeks after an alleged assault near a Dublin public house, allegedly sent a WhatsApp message in which he said he was after “opening Mulvey’s face up”.

The jury at the Central Criminal Court today heard that Ian Connaghan said that Mulvey “had it coming to him” and alleged that the deceased had almost struck him with his car when he was crossing the road.

Ian Connaghan, 34, and Daniel Connaghan, 43, of Ashington Rise, Navan Road, Cabra, Dublin 7 have pleaded not guilty to the murder of Michael ‘Mick’ Mulvey, 55, on 27 November, 2019.

Detective Garda Alan Mahony gave evidence to Antonia Boyle BL, prosecuting, of seizing mobile phones from the two accused and analysing messages on them.

He gave evidence of messages sent by Ian Connaghan to a WhatsApp group on 14 November, 2019, in which he said he was “after opening Mulvey’s face up”.

In one message, the court heard that the accused said he was standing waiting to cross the road when “this pr**k comes through the light, a foot away from hitting me.”

Mahony gave evidence that in the message, the accused said the driver of the car, Mulvey, jammed on the brakes and started screaming at him, saying: “I should have hit you.”

“I ran over and gave him a box through the window,” Mahony said the accused wrote in the message.

Mahony went on to say that in the message, Connaghan said that later in the day, Mulvey came “running at me from behind”, so Connaghan said he dropped his bag and “caught him a dig”.

“As he dropped, I caught him with a knee,” said Connaghan in the message, going on to say that he made Mulvey apologise to him.

Mahony said that in a subsequent message, Connaghan said: “I opened up his face.”

The detective said that in further messages, the accused said that Mulvey “had it coming to him”. The accused said in the message that Mulvey had spat on his leg in the pub one night.

“I’m barred for doing right by walking away. He had it coming, that’s what made me snap,” Det Mahony said the accused wrote in the message.

Det Mahony also gave evidence that Daniel Connaghan sent a message to someone in which he claimed that Mulvey had “tried to knock down Iano”, and the detective further gave evidence that in the same message Daniel Connaghan said “the two of us left him in an awful state”.

The jury also heard evidence from witness Thomas Maher, who told Anne Rowland SC, prosecuting, that on 14 November, 2019, he was returning from a hospital appointment and was travelling down the Navan Road, when he had to stop because there was a fight taking place on the traffic island at the roundabout.

He said that “some of the men” were on the road and he saw three men fighting in the middle of the island.

Maher said: “The older of the three came towards my car, and he was bleeding from the nose and mouth. As he passed in front of me, he got the swing of a punch to the side of the face.”

He said that the man who received this punch proceeded on to the car park of The Halfway House public house, while the other two men ran in the other direction. He described the punch as “a very strong hard swipe from the left” and said it was the smaller of the other two men who threw the punch.

“Two men were throwing an awful lot of punches at him,” he said, going on to describe the two men as one bigger and one smaller, but he said he did not recognise anything more about them.

The trial has heard that Mulvey’s partner Pauline Matthews awoke to find the 55-year-old had passed away in bed beside her two weeks after he suffered what the State described as a “severe beating” at the hands of the two brothers.

In her opening address to the jury last week, Rowland said there was “bad blood” between Ian Connaghan and Mulvey.

Rowland said that Ian Connaghan attacked Mulvey near The Halfway House and left him on the ground after they had a confrontation on the Navan Road in west Dublin.

The deceased, she said, was subsequently given “a severe beating” at a roundabout by Ian and his older brother Daniel Connaghan who had arrived in his car.

The brothers have also pleaded not guilty to intentionally or recklessly causing serious harm to Mulvey at the Navan Road almost two weeks earlier on 14 November, 2019.

They have further pleaded not guilty to assault causing harm to Mulvey on the same occasion.

The trial continues tomorrow before Justice Paul Burns and a jury of seven men and five women.