Man avoids jail for role in robbing pensioner

A 22-year-old Clare man has again avoided jail for his role in two robberies which caused a pensioner to cycle nearly 50km through the night in terror to check himself into a nursing home.

Joseph Lernihan, with an address at Finnuremore Park, Mullagh, had pleaded guilty at Ennis Circuit Criminal Court to two counts of robbery at the home of the then 68-year-old Michael McMahon on two separate occasions in February 2012.

On March 3, 2014, Judge Carroll Moran gave Lernihan a suspended three-year sentence, ordering him to pay €3,780 compensation and to forfeit a Volkswagen Passat he purchased with the proceeds of his crime.

The Court of Appeal agreed last week with counsel for the DPP that Lernihan’s wholly suspended sentence was unduly lenient.

However, the court refrained from imposing a prison sentence on him because incarceration now might “jeopardise the progress” he had made since the original sentencing. He was ordered to undertake 240 hours’ community service in lieu of a 12-month sentence.

Speaking on behalf of the Court of Appeal yesterday, Mr Justice George Birmingham told Lernihan that he was “absolutely, positively on your last chance”. He said quite a number of people “will feel you ought not to get that chance”.

He told him that many will feel he was lucky to get a chance the first time and “you are lucky” to get another one this time around.

During the second robbery,

Mr McMahon was terrified, Mr Justice Birmingham said, and resolved that he could no longer stay in his home. He got on his bike and cycled to a nursing home in Ennis 48km away where staff urged him to report the matter to gardaí.

The bachelor has to this day never returned to his home in a rural part of west Clare. “From a situation of living independently, he now lives in a nursing home,” the judge said.