Our fear over my brother’s killer
Farmer’s character assassinated in court, says sibling. Case has nearly been as diff icult as death
FOR more than 20 years Seamus O’Mahony would travel down a narrow country boreen in north Kerry to tend to farmland with his younger brother Anthony.
But that ended on April 4, 2017, when John ‘Anthony’ O’Mahony’s life was taken around 8am, when a farmer drove the forks of his teleporter into his car, just outside the village of Ballyduff. The vehicle was ‘lifted clear of the ground’ and the roof of the Peugeot car pierced open ‘like you’d open a can of beans’, the court was told.
At that time, Seamus was delivering concrete to Listowel, when his wife Margaret heard the briefest of details before 11am on Radio Kerry.
They weren’t aware of Anthony’s precise movements that morning, but when she heard the location of the ‘accident’ near the historic 90ft tower at Rattoo she instinctively knew.
Since then, Seamus can no longer make that journey alone.
It is lonely beyond measure, and now mired with the horror of his brother’s death.
On removal of the body, his lacerated liver could be seen at the front well of the driver’s seat, and his lacerated heart was between the side of the door and the driver’s seat.
His brother, the eldest of three siblings, was killed after suffering these ‘catastrophic injuries’, following a long-running dispute with another local farmer, Michael Ferris, who had parked his teleporter in front of Anthony’s vehicle on the narrow stretch of road.
The dispute had largely centred on the deceased’s use of a crow banger on his land – used to scare away crows from the crops – which was firing every four minutes and 26 seconds.
It all started, Seamus says, ‘over that bloody banger’.
‘It was all aggravated by the banger. Lots of things in life can aggravate you – does that give you licence to kill the person?
‘But he took the law into his own hands,’ Seamus told the Irish Mail on Sunday yesterday.
By contrast, he claims his brother – who had an unlicensed firearm in the backseat that day – ‘abided by every rule under the sun’.
‘It’s totally and utterly shocking. We are scared that this is setting a precedent…
‘We all have tempers, we all flare up, or someone might say, “I’ll kill you” but it takes a dreadful person to do it.’
Some have compared it to a modernday version of John B Keane’s The Field, conceived a stone’s throw away from Ballyduff in Listowel, over a man’s struggle to protect his life and his land.
But for Seamus this is not a script of literature, but a real-life horror, from which he can see no end.
Michael Ferris, 63, of Rattoo, Ballyduff, had pleaded not guilty to a charge of murdering the tillage farmer.
On Friday, the jury at the Central Criminal Court in Tralee delivered a verdict of manslaughter, not murder, after four and a half hours of deliberations – a verdict that has shattered the O’Mahony family and left them reeling all over again.
They firmly believed a murder charge would be handed down, given the manner of the killing.
‘We feel we got a raw deal. We are terribly disappointed with the outcome of it.
‘The case has nearly been as difficult to deal with as his death. ‘It has all been brought back again. ‘We will be scared when he is out.’ The prosecution had argued that the killing had been deliberate, while the defence said there had been accumulated provocation because of the behaviour of the dead man.
It was the prosecution’s case that Ferris ‘intentionally rammed’ Anthony’s car.
Ferris told gardaí he drove the forks of his teleporter through the car because there was no other way to stop Anthony using a loud crow banger.
The noise, he said, would ‘wake the dead’, and had been an issue for decades.
‘Surely there was some other way to get around it,’ Detective Sergeant John Heaslip asked Ferris during the interview at Listowel Garda station. ‘Believe me, there wasn’t,’ he replied.
His death, Seamus says, was unimaginable.
‘It’s one thing to lose your brother through a natural kind of death, whether he dies suddenly; people get sick, they get cancer, that happens, they get taken… but the ferocity of the thing is just unbelievable,’ he said, breaking down in tears.
‘I guess you kind of live with it. People have said to me, “You’ll get over it” but I won’t. I am too old now.’
He was not able to identify his brother’s remains that day, and was forced to leave the courtroom when evidence about his injuries was read to the court.
‘Lots of things in life can aggravate you – does that give you a licence to kill?’
I can’t go down to the farm now, unless my son James is with me. It is so hard to drive past the scene where it happened.’
In the courtroom in Tralee this week, James clasped his father’s hand tight before the manslaughter verdict was read – and he needed all the strength his son could give him.
In court, his brother was portrayed as an odd, peculiar individual who would fire shots over the heads of those on or near his land – as testified by numerous witnesses, who said that they were in fear of him.
Seamus and his wife Margaret believe that while he may have been stubborn and difficult in his own way, the way Anthony was portrayed at trial was a betrayal of the man they knew and loved.
‘I want to clear his good name,’ says Seamus, a retired teacher.
‘His character was assassinated in court, a man who is dead, with no one to defend him. ‘He was a very good man portrayed in a totally different fashion,’ said the 73-year-old, sitting in the armchair in his living room just outside Causeway.
Anthony lived 3km away from the land. His was a simple life, of simple means and ordinary pleasures.
He remained living alone in the home of his youth when his siblings married and led their own lives nearby.
Every day, his sister Angela would ‘faithfully’ bring him his dinner, and she has been left ‘totally and utterly devastated’.
‘He was very passionate and very knowledgeable about farming. He didn’t have a degree, but went to a farming college in Meath, and one of the Brothers in the college, who is in his 90s, even came down for the funeral.’
The land of more than 100 acres was theirs between them, after they bought it in 1987, having sold other land in Crecora, Co. Limerick, when the journey became too cumbersome for them.
They grew vegetables, potatoes and grain and had ‘good land for cultivation’.
Locals recall Anthony as a man happy to sit in his car, read the paper every day and smoke his Carrolls cigarettes. He had a mobile phone but never used it. They say he was not a big drinker but had the occasional glass of Jameson whiskey at Lowe’s bar in Ballyduff – though this was less common in recent times.
Romance eluded him, and the farm, watching horseracing, studying the form, and following the stock market, were his life’s salvations.
Some locals will profess that the high-profile case between two families hasn’t divided them.
But Seamus thinks differently – he feels that tensions are still simmering away, that division is imminent, and he dreads the day Ferris is released from prison. His sentence will be imposed on November 26 next.
Waves of grief come unexpectedly.
Seamus speaks of having to walk away from his family, go out into the shed, and put his head in his hands and cry when no one is looking. Soon, it will be history as far as other people are concerned, but it will never be history for us.’
Whatever the final outcome, Seamus said he is scared for the future.
Michael Ferris, a man who has no previous convictions and was described by locals as ‘so quiet you’d have to draw the words out of him’, could imaginably return to his homeland some day – and the O’Mahonys would have to travel past his house to get to their land.
Without Anthony.
‘People tell me that I’ll get over it, but I won’t. I am too old now’