A TALE OF TWO MARYS THAT STARTED ON A SUMMER’S NIGHT WITH COY GLANCES IN A NOISY DANCE HALL
IT was a summer’s night in August 2010. Inside the Times Hotel in Tipperary town, Mary Lowry and her friend, Eileen Barlow, had settled into a spot at the bar when a man made an approach.
After accepting his request for a dance, Mary made her way to the dancefloor with him, leaving Eileen alone with her drink.
‘I believe it was Bobby Ryan,’ Ms Barlow told the court when asked who the man was.
The two women had gone for a Chinese earlier in the evening and Mary had wanted to go and listen to some music. Mary loved music, said her friend, and the Times Hotel had good live bands. As Bobby and Mary sashayed around the floor, Eileen watched on contentedly from the sidelines.
‘I stayed having my drink, listening to music,’ Ms Barlow told the court.
‘I was so happy for Mary because I witnessed both Bobby and Mary dancing – Mary was so alive on the dance floor – I was glad to see that,’ she said, adding that her friend had been through ‘a very distressing stage’ because her husband had passed away from cancer.
As the witness, who had been a friend of Ms Lowry’s ‘for 26 or 27 years’ painted a scene of romantic bliss, she beamed with joy.
Mary and Bobby were ‘in great form,’ she said passionately. ‘They seem to have really connected,’ she added.
‘They were very, very happy and seemed buzzing after the dancing together.’
Eileen Barlow had come to the witness box dressed head-to-toe in black. Her dress was accented with a decorative neckline and her mid-length hair was tucked behind her ears.
As she reminisced about that night almost a decade ago, she smiled widely.
She told the court she had spoken to Bobby Ryan that night, telling him that after what Mary had been through, she wanted to make sure she was in safe hands. She asked Bobby ‘if his intentions were good’ and if he would look after Mary because she ‘needed a refuge’.
AFTER that night, ‘it would have been a few months’ before Eileen saw the couple again. Bobby was DJing in Fox’s pub in Cashel and Mary had asked Eileen to accompany her to see him, she told the court.
‘I wanted to do it because Mary had been through so much,’ she said.
Sometime after that, she met them by the Ballyglass Hotel, near Tipperary town, on St Patrick’s Day 2011. They seemed ‘very, very happy together’.
‘Mary seemed very joyous and Bobby as well,’ she said. ‘They seemed very happy,’ she added, nodding for emphasis.
As crowds of onlookers spilled into court number 13, the evidence of the day became coloured with tales of dance halls and music, of blossoming romances and amicable splits, of Mr Moonlight and the two Marys.
Later, the jury would once again be taken back to a meeting between Mr Moonlight and a Mary in the Times Hotel. On this occasion, the Mary in question was Mary Glasheen, Bobby Ryan’s ex-girlfriend.
As Ms Glasheen took to the witness box, she told the court that she and Bobby had embarked on a romance after the break-up of her own marriage, but that their courtship had ended after three months.
‘Where did you meet Bobby Ryan?’ asked the prosecution.
‘In the Times Hotel I think,’ she replied.
As a couple, they would socialise in the Times Hotel or Fox’s in Cashel where he DJed she added.
Ms Glasheen, who explained that her husband died in 2011, was dressed in a black lace cardigan and a leopardprint dress with a large gold cross draped around her neck. She spoke in a subdued tone, smiling occasionally as she responded to questions.
Herself and Bobby had remained friends despite parting ways romantically and would ‘still go to lunch on Sunday if he wasn’t working’.
Sometime after their breakup, her friend Caroline told her Bobby was seeing Mary Lowry.
‘I was delighted that he met someone,’ she said when asked how she felt about that.
‘That he would be happy hopefully,’ she added.
She had seen Mary and Bobby together, ‘in the dance hall... in the Times Hotel,’ she said and they ‘seemed happy’.
Ms Glasheen confirmed that she knew that Mary Lowry would, on occasion, stay over in Bobby Ryan’s home in Boherlahan.
THE witness recalled that she bought Bobby a mirror for his new house and had taken it to give to him. That night she stayed over ‘on the couch’ while Mary Lowry and Bobby slept upstairs.
He had also suggested Mary Glasheen accompany him and Mary to Bundoran – an offer she ultimately declined.
‘A part of me wanted to go,’ she said, smiling slightly, ‘but I decided no.
‘They were a couple and it wouldn’t have been nice to be the only person with a couple. Maybe if there was someone else.’
Mary Glasheen last spoke to Bobby on the phone the night before he went missing. He was in good form, she told the court.
After his disappearance, the two Marys continued to run into each other on the dancing circuit.
‘I met Mary Lowry at different dances after Bobby went missing,’ Mary Glasheen said in a statement given to gardaí.
‘She would look at me but wouldn’t salute.’