Travellers sue over ‘body back home in a van’ story

Three members of the Traveller community from Rathkeale claim a newspaper report implicated them in drunken riotous behaviour after a close relative died on holiday in Germany and that they tried to have the body shipped home in the back of a van.

Kathleen Hegarty and her brothers James Quilligan and Dan Quilligan yesterday sued Sunday Newspapers Ltd, publishers of the Sunday World at Limerick Circuit Court for defamation.

The case arose out of a story published in the Sunday World on May 1, 2011 which dealt with events in Cologne following the sudden death of Kathleen Hegarty’s husband Patrick Hegarty, 37.