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BACKGROUND:The trial had all the ingredients to ensure there were queues for public seats at Court 19, writes KATHY SHERIDAN
WHEN CHILDHOOD friends of Eamonn Lillis read the story about the burglar in the balaclava, they knew instantly it was fiction. As a boy in Terenure on Dublin’s south side, young Lillis was the only one they ever knew who owned a balaclava. “When we were out pretending to be shootin’ up the street, he’d be there in his balaclava being James Bond . . . That story was a total throwback to his childhood.” When he wasn’t being James Bond, he was devouring Ian Fleming’s books about 007 on her majesty’s secret service, or writing short stories, or sketching brilliantly realistic images. A vast mural of an action-packed Battle of Britain inside the garage of their immaculately kept house in Wainsfort Park was his. He was a dreamer, a doodler, an exceptionally quiet, rather detached, slightly built boy, who had little in common with his peers in Templeogue College and none of the usual interests in street kickabouts.
