Attacker’s jail term cut after priest offered to house him
But cleric no longer lives in the area after working in Iraq – and now the criminal is being released next week
A VIOLENT criminal who had his jail sentence significantly reduced after a priest told the court he could live with him in the parochial house, will be released next week.
However the Irish Mail on Sunday has learned the priest is no longer based in the area and said the offer was ‘current at the time’ of the original court case.
Christopher Higgins came before Limerick Circuit Criminal Court
Priest’s ‘impressive evidence’ in his defence
last year for his part in a robbery during which a knife was held to a tourist’s throat.
Father Tony O’Riordan spoke in defence of Higgins in an effort to reduce his sentence and even offered to allow him to live with him in the parochial house, on top of trying to secure him a job.
He told Judge Tom O’Donnell that he hoped his efforts to help Higgins, 19, would get him on the ‘straight and narrow’.
Despite the intervention, Higgins was sentenced to six years in prison with two suspended. He appealed the sentence and the Court of Appeal last week found that insufficient credit was given to the mitigating factors put forward on Higgins’s behalf, including an early plea and his youth.
Significantly Judge Michael Peart said Fr O’Riordan, then-parish priest in Moyross, gave evidence of having known Higgins for a number of years.
He said Fr O’Riordan had arranged a trial of employment and agreed Higgins could live with him under strict conditions until other arrangements were made.
There was ‘impressive evidence’ from the parish priest which indicated a real prospect for Higgins’s rehabilitation, the judge said.
The judge suspended the remainder of Higgins’s sentence meaning he will be released on Tuesday, November 14, having served just a year and a half of his sentence.
But when the MoS asked Fr O’Riordan this week if it is the plan that Higgins will live with him upon his release next week, he said: ‘I don’t know because I’ve actually been out of the country for the last few months. I am only back in the country.
‘That offer was current at the time, but then I got reassigned in January, some months after that sentence. So I’d have to talk to him and I would have to see what is possible. I am only back in the country a few days.’
Asked if no longer lives in Limerick Fr O’Riordan said: ‘Yes. I wasn’t talking to him since the appeal. I was in contact with him when I was abroad so he knows I am back the first week of November, so I am hoping to get a call from him in the next while.
‘I wasn’t at the appeal, I was in Iraq. I was working with refugees in Iraq. It was my first time. Different housing needs over there.’
The judge said rehabilitation was an important principle to be reflected in sentencing where there was specific and cogent evidence of progress.
Judge Peart, who sat with Judge George Birmingham and Judge Alan Mahon in the Court of Appeal, imposed a new six-year sentence but suspended the balance as of November 14.
‘The period between today and that date is to enable practical arrangements so as to ensure, in so far as possible, having turned a corner, he can continue on the straight road ahead [that] Fr O’Riordan certainly considers him capable of,’ Judge Peart said last week.
The victim, describing the impact of having a knife held to his throat in the St Patrick’s Day 2015 robbery on him, told the court his confidence had never returned and he suffers ‘extreme nervousness’.