Chicken goujons and chips were 'unpalatable and insufficient' for murder accused
The jury would have been unaware that the accused man’s lunch was being discussed in some detail in their absence from Courtroom 6 at the courthouse on Anglesea St, Cork. Picture: Eddie O'Hare
Chicken goujons and chips are not the generally expected contents of a legal submission on behalf of someone accused of murder.
Like most legal submissions made during a trial, the jury would have been unaware that the accused man’s lunch was being discussed in some detail in their absence from Courtroom 6 at the courthouse on Anglesea St, Cork.
Daniel Hourigan — the 33-year-old who was on trial for the murder of 61-year-old Michael Foley at his home in Macroom, Co Cork, in February 2024 — made a protest during this month’s trial.
He didn’t like the lunch that the prison service was supplying him with from a nearby takeaway, and on July 8, he refused to eat it.
He told his legal team he was not coming back for the resumption of the trial at 2pm.
It took 50 minutes before he returned, and the trial could continue.
A submission by Ray Boland, the senior counsel for the accused, said: “Mr Hourigan has been getting chicken goujons and chips every day. It is insufficient.
"He is finding it hard to concentrate in the afternoons. He is hungry. It is unsatisfactory. He finds it unpalatable and insufficient.”
The judge said to the accused: “No one is entitled to a gourmet meal in the middle of the day. But I do understand that people need to be nourished. I am very sympathetic. But I cannot be wasting the jury’s time.
“What would be satisfactory from your perspective without it being a gourmet offering? Will I leave it to counsel to navigate? I have considerable sympathy for him.”
On the afternoon of the following day, Mr Boland said to the judge: “You will be glad to hear Mr Hourigan was particularly satisfied with his lunch — chicken curry.”
With diet no longer an obstacle, it was a simple matter of focusing purely on Hourigan.
Well, it was, and it wasn’t.
The name Linda O’Flynn kept coming up.
But who was this Linda O’Flynn?
She was initially described rather quaintly as Hourigan’s companion.
Along the way, she was described as his then partner.
By the end of the trial, the defence lawyer was categorising her in less flattering terms as going from “zero to terrifying”, like a scene from
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What the jury was not told was that there had
been a trial last November before another jury when Hourigan and O’Flynn sat in the same dock together, not speaking to each other.
They were both charged with murder.
They both denied it and blamed each other and claimed they were only guilty of a cover-up for the other person.
At one stage, tensions boiled to the point where a bottle of Coca-Cola literally came to the fore in the case.
O’Flynn was drinking from a bottle of Coke in the dock when, suddenly, she threw it with some force at Hourigan.
The plastic bottle and its contents missed the intended target and struck a bench on which the solicitor for the DPP was sitting, narrowly missing her.
That first trial lumbered on, but before long, there was a development. The prosecution said O’Flynn could be re-arraigned.
They accepted her plea to covering up the crime.
The murder charge against her was gone.
Hourigan’s legal team argued that all this was now prejudicial, the trial would have to be aborted, and a new jury sworn in.
O'Flynn was sentenced to seven and a half years, with the last six months suspended, and is presently serving that sentence.
Even after two trials, there is a murkiness in relation to why Michael Foley was murdered, even as the jury has found as a matter of fact that the murder was carried out by Hourigan.
The late Mr Foley drank a lot. He felt fortunate to have a little house in Macroom, and he kept it tidy.
Friends said he had pride in his appearance and kept himself well-dressed.
His last hours were captured on CCTV shopping around Macroom on January 31, 2024.
Just as he arrived home, Hourigan — distantly related to Mr Foley through marriage — and O’Flynn were seen on CCTV stepping off the bus they got from Cork to Macroom and making their way to Mr Foley's house.
Even though the house at Annville is small, it appears that Hourigan and O’Flynn were never aware that night that there was a fourth person present.
Neringa Stalioniene, aged 43, met Mr Foley in November 2022 when she was homeless and using Simon facilities in Cork, and they had a platonic friendship.
She stayed in the smaller bedroom of his home from time to time.
She stayed on the night of January 31/ February 1, 2024, locking the door to the small bedroom and lying low.
Her evidence was significant.
At 7.35am, on February 1, 2024, she met Mr Foley in the hallway, and he looked normal, and uninjured.
He told her to leave.
Before she did, she heard sounds from his bedroom: “I heard a voice, I think a man’s voice, there may have been more. A lot of fuck, fuck, fuck.”
The now convicted murderer, Hourigan, left the house at around 11am, following O’Flynn, who left a minute and a half before him.
Ms Stalioniene’s importance to the case was not finished.
She returned to Annville an hour and a half after the two had left: “The first sound I heard when I entered was, he shouted to get out of my house.
"He sounded very, very drunk. It sounded like something in his throat. I didn’t see him. I didn’t hear anyone in the house this time.
"I think the TV was on in the background. I closed the door and left the house.”
Even though it was not until five days later that a nurse called and found Mr Foley dead on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood with a cushion under his head, detectives could, thanks to Ms Stalioniene’s crucial evidence, pinpoint the time of the murder.
Significant testimonies in the case were given by Dr Margaret Bolster, assistant state pathologist, who described 11 stab wounds and 19 slashes to Mr Foley’s body, and by Bus Éireann driver Paudie McKenna who found the murder weapon — a bloody carving knife in a refuse bag — carried on to the Macroom to Cork bus.
There was also forensic evidence of blood, DNA, and the murderer’s palmprint at the scene of the crime in the victim’s blood.
As the evidence piled up, Hourigan’s story evolved from effectively saying: “I wasn’t even in Macroom that night”, to blaming O’Flynn and claiming that he only tried to cover up whatever she did.
And of course his unguarded comment to Detective Garda Coffey when he said, “Fintan, it was not premeditated,” a comment he tried to whitewash, if not recant, in the trial.
The jury found enough to convict him of murder.
Hourigan is now facing more prison meals than any of us would ever want.
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