Nobody could be a better friend than a good neighbour: but no enemy could be worse than a bad one

IT IS hard to imagine an end more nightmarish than that suffered by Kerry farmer John Anthony O’Mahony early one spring morning last year. The elderly bachelor had left his farmhouse in Ardoughter to drive to lands he owned with his brother in Ballyduff, five kilometres away, to set a ‘crow banger’ in his fields. The device, and the deafening noise it made, had been a cause of friction between himself and locals living near those fields for years.

He was more irritated than alarmed that morning, though, when he came across another farmer’s tractor blocking his route, parked crossways on the road with a twin-pronged teleporter hitched to its chassis.

He’d have recognised the tractor as belonging to Michael Ferris, a bachelor farmer like himself, ten years his junior and a long-time foe. Fifteen years earlier, a similar device had vanished from O’Mahony’s field and was located in a shed belonging to Ferris, and there had been bad blood between them since. Still, O’Mahony had no reason to think other than that Ferris had briefly left his tractor while he tended to an animal or checked on some fencing, and he began to hoot his car horn impatiently.

Gruesome

What happened next gave rise to some of the most graphic and gruesome evidence ever heard in an Irish criminal court. Hearing the car horn, Ferris calmly left his brother milking the cows, walked to his vehicle and climbed into the driver’s seat. As O’Mahony watched, Ferris straightened the tractor, raised the prongs of the teleporter and drove directly towards the older man’s car.

Too late, O’Mahony realised the danger he was in. Strapped in his seat and helpless as the prongs approached him, he raised his arms in a futile attempt to protect himself. From the evidence it appears that Ferris reversed repeatedly and impaled the car and its captive passenger again and again. The prongs pierced O’Mahony’s head and body in at least five places, on two occasions going right through to the car seat behind. His lacerated heart was found between the driver’s seat and the door, and his mutilated liver lay in the car’s footwell.

Even though Ferris had gone directly to a neighbour’s house and admitted what he’d done, and that family had alerted the gardaí, officers were surprised to find the horrific scene deserted.

It is hard to blame the family of John Anthony O’Mahony for their dismay at the manslaughter verdict returned last Friday afternoon. Ferris had admitted to gardaí that he’d killed his neighbour because of the crow banger: ‘He had to be stopped, and that was it.’ He had made no attempt to hide the teleporter or clean its prongs, which were smeared with blood, flesh and broken glass, before the gardaí arrived.

He blamed years of persistent provocation from the noise of the crow banger, coupled with O’Mahony’s refusal to heed complaints about the misery it was causing: ‘I just snapped,’ he told gardaí.

It has become something of a cliché, in the reporting of crimes like this, to make comparisons with John B Keane’s The Field. Every rural townland and parish in the country can recount such a story, of mysterious deaths and even murders linked to bitter land-based rows, of neighbours who saw or heard nothing, of suspicions and rumours that linger for years, of communities divided by sympathy and support, of secrets kept for generations.

And there’s no doubt that disputes over land, whether over rights of way, access to water, boundaries or trespass, evoke a primal passion in men and women of the soil that urban dwellers can’t comprehend. It may date back to Famine times, even earlier, when clinging to a smallholding against all challengers meant the difference between life and death.

Conflict

But this, arguably, was not such a case. Rather, this was a tragedy that could have unfolded in any community, urban or rural. This mortal conflict does not appear to have had its roots in land, in who owned what or who seized somebody else’s field, but rather in the notion of neighbourliness.

And its lessons have a reach far beyond the boundaries of an ancient Kerry parish. Over the weekend John Anthony O’Mahony’s family and acquaintances from the wider community defended the relative and friend they knew. ‘He’s been torn to shreds, and not just in the physical sense,’ said one local, ‘his character has been torn to shreds.’ They recalled an intelligent, progressive, meticulous farmer, obsessive about his crops. The crow banger, they insisted, was about keeping birds from uprooting seeds and attacking young plants, ‘not about getting at’ his neighbours.

Whatever its purpose, though, that was the effect, and those who lived within earshot of the crow banger told a very different story.

.In the months before his death, witnesses said, O’Mahony had begun to move the banger closer and closer to houses on the lane, but they all feared tackling him about it..

And it sounds as if the locals had reason to fear O’Mahony. In 1987 he was convicted of shooting and injuring members of a local gun club who followed dogs into a field, and, although he was no longer allowed to hold a firearm, an unlicensed shotgun and cartridges were found in the boot of his car on the day he died.

Consequence

The picture of O’Mahony that emerged at his trial was of a man with no regard for his immediate neighbours. The stress, the sleeplessness, the discomfort he caused them was of little consequence compared to his own interests.

And that’s not a phenomenon confined to country places – disputes between neighbours over noise, anti-social behaviour, vandalism are among the bitterest and most intractable to come before the courts. Whether in the middle of the countryside or the heart of the city, your home should be your refuge: when the peaceful enjoyment of that is threatened or destroyed, the psychological impact is profound and the responses often entirely disproportionate.

Time and again judges plead with warring neighbours to patch up their differences before they bankrupt each other over a trivial row about a hedge, a gate or a security light. They rarely listen.

When neighbours fall out, it seems, all rationality often deserts them. O’Mahony’s neighbours could have taken a civil action for noise pollution – just last April another Kerry farmer was sued by neighbours, under the Environmental Protection Act, for using a crow banger.

But the bad feeling between O’Mahony and his neighbours went on for so long, and had become so intense that, the jury accepted, Michael Ferris was pushed to a point where he saw no solution but his neighbour’s death, and this otherwise quiet, popular farmer committed the most horrific of acts. And he must have known he’d face years in jail, far from the land on which, it seems, his only wish was to live in peace.

When neighbours fall out, whether they be farmers or city folk, there is rarely any logic, and never any winners.