Murder victim 'would beat defendant son', court hears

A Tipperary woman has told a murder trial that she looked out her window one night last year and saw her neighbour beating his father with a shovel.

Margaret Carroll was giving evidence to the Central Criminal Court in the trial of a 23-year-old man accused of murdering his father.

James McInerney of Lacey Avenue, Templemore has pleaded not guilty to murdering 56-year-old James 'Jimmy' McInerney Snr at the family home on June 17, 2009.

Ms Carroll said that the deceased was roaring abuse at his wife from his back yard that night.

“He was cursing at his wife, asking her to let him into the house,” she testified. “He was calling her names: whore and tramp. He was quite cross.”

Ms Carroll went upstairs and looked out her back window.

“He had I think a shovel in his hand,” she recalled. “He drew a belt at the door with it.”

She said that Mrs McInerney wouldn’t let her husband in and he smashed a beer bottle on the ground.

“He was calling everybody names, telling them to come out,” she said.

She rang the gardaí after he smashed a window in the defendant’s van with a stone.

“I knew it was going to turn out nasty,” she said.

She called the gardaí twice more before returning to the window.

“I saw young Jimmy (the defendant) smacking old Jimmy (the deceased) with the shovel,” she said, explaining that she saw him swing it about six times.

“He was curled on the ground,” she said of the older man.

She went downstairs and the gardaí were arriving.

“Young Jimmy came around the front after a while. He said he didn’t mean to kill him,” she said.

“Ask any of the neighbours. They all know what he’s like,” he added, Ms Carroll confirmed under cross examination by the defence. “He wore the shovel off my back. This was a long time coming. He was always at the mother. Call the guards. Call an ambulance.”

Ms Carroll’s partner, Raymond Burke, said he heard the deceased call the accused Nancy Boy and queer that night while demanding that he come out of the house. He presumed that he was calling him out to fight.

He said that when the accused came around the front afterwards he said he may as well be in prison as his father was beating his mother every weekend.

The victim’s widow Eileen McInerney told the court that they would have been married 25 years this summer and they had 10 children. It was an arranged marriage as they were Travellers, she said, but it was not a happy one.

“He was violent and very dangerous. If he got in the house, he’d beat you up,” she told defence barrister Brendan Grehan. “I used to lock myself in I was that afraid of him.”

She said this had been going on more than 20 years and she did not allow him into the house when drunk; he slept in a caravan out the back.

“He’d get drunk and come up and beat me. I ended up in hospital with 40 to 50 stitches,” she said, explaining that he had beaten her face with broken bottles, iron bars and sticks, and that the beatings didn’t stop when she was pregnant.

“I’d run away with the kids into the neighbours and to the nuns,” she recalled.

She said he used to beat their children too, especially the defendant.

“He gave James an awful life. He couldn’t go to bed. He used to have to lie in ditches and in people’s hay barns,” she said. “He broke his two hands and his leg.”

She said her husband had forced him to drink alcohol from an early age, beating him if he refused.

Her son wouldn’t leave home though.

“He stayed anyway because he was very protective of me,” she said. “I don’t think I’d be here today only for him.”

When asked what would set her husband off, she replied: “Nothing at all. He’d just do it and that’s it. He was a bad man.”

The trial continues before Mr Justice John Edwards.