Witness at murder trial said chef was ‘killed in cold blood for being gay’ in Cork

SLAIN Cork chef Timmy Hourihane “was killed in cold blood for no other reason than he was gay”, a key witness at his murder trial has said.

Kathleen O’Brien said she threw herself over Mr Hourihane, trying to protect him from a vicious attack at a tented village off Mardyke Walk in Cork City where they were both living at the time of his death on October 13, 2019.

James Brady, aged 28, of Shannon Lawn, Mayfield, Cork, is on trial for Mr Hourihane’s murder and has pleaded not guilty. Another man has also been charged with his murder and is to be tried at a later date.

Ms O’Brien said that on the night of the killing, a man who cannot be named for legal reasons and Mr Brady “were shouting and yelling and screaming” in the tented village.

“They were firing each other up, getting angrier and angrier,” Ms O’Brien said.

“They came across Timmy. They started beating him. James Brady and [the unnamed man] hit Timmy. Timmy fell down.

“James Brady and [unnamed man] were shouting, egging each other on. I seen them stamp on Timmy’s head. Both of them.

“Then one started stamping on his legs. They were taking turns.

“I threw my body over Timmy’s head to try to protect him, then down to his legs.”

Ms O’Brien said she moved from covering Mr Hourihane’s head to his legs, trying to deflect the blows as the two men allegedly moved from one unprotected area to the next during the alleged attack.

“James Brady opened his [Mr Hourihane’s] legs and said to [unnamed man] to ‘go on kick him, he’s only a faggot.’ I could hear Timmy gurgling,” Ms O’Brien said.

“I screamed and pleaded, everything, for them to stop.

“I ended up with a black eye, a few bruises, a few hits to the head.”

Mr Hourihane was “covered with his own blood” by the end of the attack, she said.

“Maybe they exhausted themselves by beating so much. It finally stopped when the man was beyond recognition.”

Ms O’Brien gave a statement to gardaí following the alleged attack, initially saying that she knew nothing about it because she “was scared for my life after seeing what they did”. However, she later changed her statement because she remembered vividly “the nightmare” of what happened to Mr Hourihane.

She said that she suffered a brain hemorrhage and fractured skull a number of months after his death and her memory has been patchy since.

Senior counsel Vincent Heneghan alleged that Ms O’Brien’s version of events was inaccurate. He said that his client, Mr Brady, had said that another man had started the alleged attack on Mr Hourihane that night and that both Mr Brady and Ms O’Brien tried to stop this unnamed man from attacking the victim.

However, Ms O’Brien said that two men killed Mr Hourihane.

Two witnesses

Two witnesses who were volunteering on a soup run in Cork City said that Mr Brady appeared to be in pain in the hours before the killing.

They said that he was covered in blood following a separate assault and was so unsteady on his feet that Liam O’Connor and Mary O’Neill gave him a lift back to Mardyke Walk from the Patrick Street soup kitchen, they said.

“He was in very poor condition. We had to help him out of the car,” Ms O’Neill said.

“I’d met James before. He was quiet, always polite.”

However, Justice Deirdre Murphy noted that CCTV showed him walking back into the camp unaided shortly after 11pm.

A climate of fear — with volatile outbursts, threats, and violent attacks — had settled over the makeshift tented village off Mardyke Walk before the killing, the court heard.

There were beatings, fractious divisions between groups there, and allegations that people put crumpled biscuits into other’s tents to attract rats.

Further witnesses

Two witnesses were so afraid that they tried to leave the campsite with Mr Hourihane in the hours before his death. However, they couldn’t carry everything and decided to stay until they had some money to make the move more possible.

Mr Hourihane had only returned to the camp a few days before his death.

Kellie Lynch and her partner, Ivana Bozic, were friends of Mr Hourihane’s. They had lent him a tent the night before the killing because he had nowhere to sleep.

That night, there had been an altercation in the camp and the women had called gardaí. The next day, they were threatened.

Ms Lynch said that Mr Hourihane was “a jolly person” who “talked away to everybody”.

The three of them had been together that day in their tents and then in Cork City but they got separated around Tuckey Street when the victim stopped to talk to someone.

When they arrived back to Mardyke Walk shortly after midnight, the tent next to theirs was “totally blazed up” and their own tent was also catching fire.

“It was scary. We had threats that day saying ‘burn baby burn’,” Ms Lynch said.

She said that they left the area in shock, aware that people were looking after a man on the ground who Ms Bozic thought was Mr Hourihane.

Frightening

Another witness, Martin Harrington, who was also homeless at the time and living in the tented village, said that life at the camp was frightening.

He had been attacked at the camp a short time before Mr Hourihane’s death and believed he would have been killed had another man not intervened.

On the night of the killing, he said that there was “a big racket outside”.

“I thought it was going to turn into a gang fight or something,” Mr Harrington said.

“I was getting worried because I didn’t want to be stuck in the middle of a street fight between gangs.”

When he went out to see what was going on, he said that Mr Brady said: “Fuck off and mind your own business. It has nothing to do with you.”

Mr Harrington said: “I legged it and I called the guards. ‘You have to come down here fast. If you don’t hurry up some will get hurt or even killed.’”

The trial in front of Justice Murphy and a jury of seven women and five men continues.

Mr Hourihane, a father of one, was a trained chef and had previously worked for the Hilton Hotel group in the UK but was homeless at the time of his death.