Mother raises fresh questions about Holohan killing

The mother of schoolboy Robert Holohan today claimed semen had been found on her dead son’s body.

The 11-year-old was killed by Wayne O’Donoghue on January 4 last year and his body was dumped by the engineering student near Inch Strand.

At the sentencing hearing for O’Donohue in the Central Criminal Court, Majella Holohan took to the stand and said there were many unanswered questions about her son’s death.

She said she knew that semen had been found on her son’s body.

She referred to O’Donoghue’s explanation for the start of their confrontation which led to the death of her son, in which he said Robert had been throwing stones at his car.

“Would you kill someone for throwing stones at their car?” she said.

She said there had been no forensic evidence that stones had hit the car and questioned why there were no fingerprints found on her son’s mobile phone.

“Who wiped it clean and deleted a number of images from it?” she said.

She told a packed courtroom that Robert’s phone had shown that Wayne had contacted him at 6am.

“What was Robert doing in Wayne’s bedroom at 7.30am when he was supposed to have been on a sleepover?” she asked.

Mrs Holohan also asked why her little boy had rang 999 that morning as his phoned showed he did and why were his two runners were off when his body was discovered.

“Whatever happens here today, even if we do move home, even if we do leave the country, there is no place to hide from this nightmare. This is the situation we face every day,” she said.

O’Donohue, 21, from Ballyedmond, Midleton, in County Cork, was found not guilty of the murder of Robert Holohan but guilty of his manslaughter by a jury in Cork last month.

Dressed in a black suit, white shirt with a criss-cross navy tie, he kept his eyes fixed on the floor as Mrs Holohan delivered her victim report.