‘I felt the blame was being put on Mary,’ said her loyal brother
‘He was angry. He hadn’t good things to say’’
IT was June 2011 and Bobby Ryan had been missing for several days when Pat Quirke joined a small search party that was searching for him.
Quirke, who is now accused of killing his love rival Ryan, was accompanied in the car by his brother-in-law Jimmy Lowry and Eddie Quigley, the brother of his former lover, Mary Lowry.
The three men drove around looking for any signs of Bobby Ryan but they found nothing.
As he was getting out of the car on their return, Jimmy Lowry, whose brother Martin had been married to Mary before he died from cancer in 2007, remarked: ‘This wouldn’t have happened if Martin Lowry were still alive.’
This week Eddie Quigley admitted in the Central Criminal Court that the statement had angered him. ‘I didn’t really like that,’ he said. ‘. . . you got out and slammed the door,’ defence counsel Bernard Condon put it to him.
‘I felt the blame was definitely being put on Mary,’ he replied.
Previously Mr Quigley had described how he and Mary had grown up on a small farm in Newport, in Tipperary.
He was the second child and she was the third and they were close.
He visited her frequently.
This week he followed his sister in giving evidence in the murder trial.
Dressed in a mauve shirt, with a dark striped tie, he fixed his gaze intently on the barristers questioning him.
He told how the accused, Pat Quirke, had approached him after Mary had finished with him in favour of Bobby Ryan. ‘He was angry, he hadn’t good things to say about Bobby Ryan. He said that Bobby Ryan was a DJ. . . out playing music at night... and he’s a man for the women.’
Later Mr Quigley, a father of four and a builder by trade, was asked what he had spoken about with his sister on the phone at 9.05pm on the evening before Bobby Ryan went missing?
He said he couldn’t remember but remembered that she had phoned him the following day after midday to tell him that Bobby was gone.
Two days after he went missing, Ms Lowry asked him to accompany her to see a psychic. ‘Mary wanted to go down to a psychic in Nenagh so I went with her, to see if that could help in any way.’
Under cross-examination by Mr Condon, he admitted that after Mary’s husband died, he’d asked his younger sister a few times whether she was having an affair.
She denied it and ‘was cross’ at the suggestion.
A few weeks after Pat Quirke’s son had died tragically in August 2012, Quirke approached her brother and said that Mary ‘was a right bitch’ because she didn’t support him or Melly (Quirke’s wife Imelda) after the death.
Mr Quigley says he replied: ‘Do you not think Mary has enough to deal with?’
Mr Quirke then told him that he only wanted ‘friends and family, good friends’, at his son’s month’s mind Mass, and that if Ms Lowry went he would personally remove her from the church himself.