‘DEVIOUS’: DEFENCE ATTACKS MARY LOWRY
PATRICK Quirke’s defence team launched a vigorous attack on Mary Lowry in its closing speech yesterday, labelling her evidence unreliable, uncorroborated and devious.
In a piercing summary of her four-day testimony as the main witness in the trial, Mr Quirke’s barrister said she was ‘not capable of telling the truth’ and that she had ‘fabricated evidence’ to suit the narrative.
Bernard Condon, SC for the defence, spent several hours yesterday going through Ms Lowry’s evidence in detail, alleging that she had the ‘capacity to say whatever suited her’ and that she had tried to ‘do down’ her ex-lover in court.
Mr Quirke, 50, of Breanshamore, Co. Tipperary, has pleaded not guilty to the murder of Bobby Ryan, 52, a DJ known as Mr Moonlight, on a date between June 3, 2011 and April 2013. Mr Ryan’s body was discovered by Mr Quirke in an underground run-off tank on Ms Lowry’s farm almost two years after he went missing.
Ms Lowry tried to do a ‘devious’ thing, Mr Condon said, when she gave evidence about seeing Mr Quirke on the day Mr Ryan went missing. Ms Lowry was interviewed in June 2011 and told gardaí that she saw Mr Quirke at about 8.30am on her driveway that Friday morning. She said Mr Quirke would be coming and going at all times and that she knew he was going away that weekend.
In a statement in 2013, following the discovery of the body, she said she didn’t know Mr Quirke was going away, that it was unusual for him to be there so early and that she noted he was ‘hot and sweaty and bothered looking’. Mr Condon said she told this to a jury that is being asked to ‘convict a man of the most serious offence of murder’, and added: ‘That was a piece of the most devious, devious poison that has been delivered across the face of the Central Criminal Court for many a year.’
In cross examination, Ms Lowry denied telling lies and said she couldn’t remember what she said seven years ago, adding: ‘I speak the truth to what my memory is.’
Mr Condon claimed she had told the jury an ‘obvious lie’ and asked them to consider the reason why.
‘Why is she doing that,’ he asked. ‘What is going on here?’
Mr Condon told the jury they should have concerns about the evidence given by Ms Lowry and the manner in which she was prepared to revise history. He said she was someone who was ‘not capable of telling the truth’.
He said that Ms Lowry claimed that Mr Quirke was not a good friend of her husband’s despite evidence that suggested they were. He reminded them that Ms Lowry had described her affair with Mr Quirke as ‘sordid’, but Mr Condon suggested this was again a piece of ‘revisionism’ from someone who was trying to put a ‘spin’ on things.
He asked them to consider the statement made to gardaí by her brother Eddie Quigley in which he said he told Mr Quirke: ‘Mary will make up her own mind and you and me won’t change that.’
That, Mr Condon suggested, is a very different view of Ms Lowry to the ‘naive or vulnerable person she seeks to present’.
He told the jury that he had a very significant worry that she was ‘about the business of manipulation’ in the witness box. The suggestion, Mr Condon said, that Ms Lowry was a vulnerable person who was controlled by Mr Quirke was based almost entirely on the ‘uncorroborated and unsupported evidence of Ms Lowry’.
He claimed there were inconsistencies in what she had told gardaí about certain events and what she had said in court.
In particular, he claimed that her ‘presentation’ about the weekend she spent with Mr Ryan in Bundoran, was ‘absolutely
‘Not capable of telling the truth’ ‘The business of manipulation’
calculated to manipulate’.
The trial heard Ms Lowry was annoyed when she found Mr Ryan dancing with another woman and that she ‘gave out’ to him for five hours on the journey home.
Mr Condon said that in fact what had happened was that they broke up on the journey home.
The trial heard they reconciled two days later. Ms Lowry subsequently told gardaí Mr Ryan was dancing with a woman in Bundoran whom he had met the night before. But when she was quizzed in court, she said this was a woman Mr Ryan had known years before and they were just catching up on old times, he said. Closing defence submissions continue today.