The AI woman, a change in routine, and rumours of a ‘Polish gang’
A week of court evidence from the day Ryan vanished
BREDA O’Dwyer was on her feet, pointing to an enlarged version of a sketch she had drawn for gardaí. It was a fairly rudimentary drawing of Pat Quirke’s milking parlour on his home farm, showing the location where each cow would stand to be milked clearly identifiable.
‘Pat was standing there,’ she declared, pointing to a large X, just below where cows would be milked from above.
For Ms O’Dwyer, an artificial insemination (AI) technician who had been visiting Mr Quirke’s farm for more than 15 years, the fact that he was standing at the point marked X when she arrived on the morning of June 3, 2011, was anything but normal.
Herself and Mr Quirke had a long-established routine, she explained. The AI season starts on about April 20 and most farmers do it for about six to eight weeks. This would require her to travel to client farms on a daily basis during that period. She had an understanding with Mr Quirke that she would call to his farm every morning unless he texted her to say he had no cows bulling.
Normally, Pat wouldn’t be there when she arrived.
‘He would normally be cleaned up and gone,’ she said, adding that the machinery in the milking parlour would be off and the ‘whole place would be spotless.’
He would leave a Post-It note for her, detailing the number of the cow or cows to be inseminated, the ‘straw’ (semen) that had to be used and the date.
On June 3, 2011, the day Bobby Ryan went missing, she said she met Mr Quirke in the milking parlour on the farm.
‘As far as I recall Pat was still milking his cows,’ she said. ‘He was standing in the pit.’
Ms O’Dwyer said she spent about 15 minutes on the farm, inseminating two cows and when she was leaving Mr Quirke was ‘still in the same place’.
The time would have been ‘9.30 anyway’, she said.
Last week, in the very same courtroom, the jury heard what Patrick Quirke told gardaí about his movements on the morning in question.
Mr Quirke told them he never checks the time but thought that he probably got up around 6.15am. He milked the cows at his own place at Breanshamore. He had 120 animals at this time, he said. There were around 15 in a row in the dairy, with each row taking around ten to 12 minutes to milk. While he was milking the cows, he got a text from Seán Dillon, a young boy who helped out on the farm, who wanted to come down. Mr Quirke said he ‘made use of him’ and told him to come. He was on the second last row of cows when Seán arrived, he said.
It was around 8.30am and Mr Quirke left him to finish the milking while he went to Fawnagown, where he rented land from Mary Lowry, to collect his bulls from the shed.
‘I wanted to get in and out fast,’ he said. He dropped off the bulls, left them to follow the cows back to the paddock and went in for breakfast at 9.30am, Mr Quirke said.
During her evidence on Wednesday, Breda O’Dwyer said she had a ‘general conversations’ with Patrick Quirke after the body of Bobby Ryan, a father of two, was found at Fawnagown.
She said Mr Quirke asked her did she remember that Seán Dillon was with him on the morning of June 3, 2011. She told the court that she did not see Seán there but that didn’t mean he wasn’t there.
She also said Mr Quirke said gardaí had taken his mobile phone and examined the data on it. He told her that they would be contacting her.
Seán Dillon, the jury was told after he stepped into the box, had worked on Mr Quirke’s farm from the age of about seven. His father is a first cousin of Mr Quirke’s wife Imelda and they live in the same area.
Mr Quirke reimbursed him for his work by giving him a bull at the end of the year. When he was 17 Mr
‘I was frightened when I heard’
Quirke paid for his car insurance, which was €3,000.
He was 14 in June 2011, when Bobby Ryan went missing.
That month, the day after his school holidays began, he was working on Mr Quirke’s farm and moving bales on his own family farm a few minutes drive away.
‘It was just a normal day,’ said Mr Dillon. Milking usually finished around 9.30am, he said, but he agreed with defence counsel Bernard Condon that the times could vary if cows were further out in the fields or if other jobs needed to be done. He added that it wouldn’t be unusual for Mr Quirke to ask him to finish off the last row of cows during milking.
‘It was such a long time ago,’ he added. ‘I think I did. I’m not sure.’
He said he couldn’t recall seeing the AI woman there. Mr Dillon said he ‘didn’t have a good memory in general’ and accepted he ‘could be confused’ in relation to some of his evidence.
When he heard about Mr Ryan’s body being found in the tank at Fawnagown he said he was ‘quite frightened’ by it. Not long beforehand, he had been worked near it.
On Tuesday, jurors heard from two other witnesses who had worked for Mr Quirke over the years.
Gary Cunningham said he had started out doing a work placement on Mr Quirke’s farm at Breanshamore, Co. Tipperary, in February 2013, milking and feeding cows.
He said that after Mr Ryan’s body was discovered in a run-off tank at Fawnagown, he had ‘one quick conversation’ with Mr Quirke about it. Mr Quirke asked him if he had heard any rumours about what had happened. Mr Cunningham said he hadn’t and that Mr Quirke told him he heard that a ‘Polish group’ were involved in the murder of Bobby Ryan.
In re-examination, he said that there ‘were so many rumours going round’ at the time that he couldn’t recall if he had heard the Polish rumour from anyone other than Mr Quirke.
Mr Cunningham told the court that he was not aware of the tank where the body was found. To the best of his knowledge, he added, the area where it was located was used as a grazing paddock.
Mr Cunningham was asked if he was working on the day the body was recovered. He said that he was not, as he had got a kick from a cow the Friday before.
David Humphries BL for the Prosecution asked how he was after that.
‘I was limping. I got a fair kick. I couldn’t walk,’ said Mr Cunningham said.
Mr Cunningham said he had returned to work the day after the body was found.
He said Pat Quirke told him to go up to collect the tractor and vacuum tanker from Fawnagown as it needed to go back to the Quirke home farm. The witness said it was ‘around the back of the farm somewhere’.
In relation to the morning routine at Breanshamore, he said that milking started at about 7.30am or 8am in the milking parlour. It normally took himself and Pat Quirke between 1hour 45minutes and 2hours to milk cows, from milking to wash up. They would normally finish milking around 9am.
Asked about the spreading of slurry on the farm at Fawnagown, Gary Cunningham said he carried it out when he was there, using a tractor on the back of a tanker.
Emmet Kenny, who had also started out working with Mr Quirke on a work placement scheme, also gave evidence. His placement had started in February 2009 and ran for three months after which Mr Quirke hired him. He was involved in general farm work which included looking after cattle and milking cows. He confirmed that the milking was done in Mr Quirke’s home farm and that the process of milking Mr Quirke’s 120 cows took about 130 to 140 minutes.
In October 2018, Mr Kenny went to Fawnagown with gardaí and pointed out to them a septic tank in a field in front of Ms Lowry’s house. Mr Kenny erected a fence around the septic tank when he started working for Mr Quirke.
He put up this fence, he said, because Mr Quirke told him that a heifer had suffered an injury to her leg when it got caught between gaps in the concrete. He accepted under cross-examination that he was not there when the heifer was injured. He agreed that it was ‘quite possible’ he was wrong in thinking the heifer was injured at that tank. He added that he always thought the tank where Mr Ryan’s body was found was an old septic tank.
This witness knew of the tank where Mr Ryan’s body was found because he regularly carried out jobs around that area. He thought it was an old septic tank and said there was a ditch beside it where cattle would shelter when it rained. Cattle would walk on top of the tank but they had no effect on the concrete slabs covering it, he said. Mr Kenny said he never fenced off that tank.
In relation to Mary Lowry, he said that he had seen her about 20 times in total.
He would see her ‘around the yard’ where she had a greenhouse. He recalled Mr Quirke telling him that Mary Lowry has a good farm, but they never discussed her apart from that.
Under cross-examination by Mr Condon he accepted that he previously told gardaí that Mr Quirke told him that Martin Lowry, Ms Lowry’s deceased husband, was a good farmer.
He said he never spread slurry in Breanshamore or Fawnagown. He said that contractors spread slurry at both farms, Patrick O’Donnell in Fawnagown and another contractor at Breanshamore.
He said he recalled Patrick Quirke being away over the bank holiday in June 2013.
He said Mr Quirke had told him about it about two weeks beforehand and asked him would he be around to do jobs that weekend.
The witness arrived that Friday at about 5.30pm to milk the cows and noticed two bulls in a field about 60 or 70 yards from the cows.
The day after the discovery of Mr Ryan’s body Mr Kenny met the accused in the milking parlour at Breanshamore.
Mr Quirke asked: ‘Did you hear?’ and the witness replied: ‘I did yes.’ That was all he said.
Mary Lowry had ‘a good farm’