Dubliner Noel Kirwan was an innocent man whose murder three days before Christmas inflicted a “nightmare” on his family, his daughter Donna has told the Special Criminal Court.
In a victim impact statement, Donna Kirwan directly addressed Kinahan cartel member Seán McGovern, saying he should have been “out buying Christmas presents for your kids” and not “planning the murder” of her father.
The three-judge court heard the statement and evidence on Monday and will hear further submissions on Friday before sentencing McGovern.
The 40-year-old, with a previous address at Kildare Road, Crumlin, Dublin 12, has pleaded guilty to directing the activities of a criminal organisation between October 20th and December 22nd, 2016, in relation to the murder of Christopher ‘Noel’ Kirwan.
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He also admitted directing the activities of a criminal organisation between October 17th, 2015, and April 6th, 2017, in connection with the surveillance of James Gately in preparation for the commission of an indictable offence.
The maximum sentence for the offences is life imprisonment.
In her victim impact statement, read on Monday by prosecuting barrister Maddie Grant, Donna Kirwan said December 22nd, 2016, started off as a normal day but turned into the family’s “worst nightmare”.
She was expecting a call from her father about bringing her to collect her son’s Christmas toys, but instead got a call to say that her father had been shot.
When she got to her father’s home in Clondalkin, she was told he “didn’t make it” and, when being taken to a neighbour’s house, not to look to the left where her father’s body lay on the ground.
“The pain I felt that night will never leave me,” she said.
When speaking that night to her brother Christopher in Manchester, she said she would never forget his screams “as long as I live”.
It was not until Christmas Eve that they saw their father in the morgue, and the following days were “like a horror film”.
It was very hard to say how much this had affected all their lives, she said. Their mother died 10 years ago from cancer, but this was “different” and “unbearable”.
“Our dad was all we had. He was our dad, our friend and our safety net.”
Noel Kirwan had some friends who chose to make money selling drugs, she said, but he was a “grafter” who worked two jobs and chose to work for a living “because that was how he was raised”.
He was very kind, would “give the clothes off his back” and gave drug addicts and homeless people money for lunch. He was very quiet and private, lived for his family and was “meant to walk me down the aisle some day”.
His death “has destroyed us”, she said. The family all struggle with what went on that night and there “is not an hour that passes when we don’t think about it”.
She said McGovern himself was wounded during the 2016 Regency Hotel attack, and asked him: “Why would you choose to inflict that pain on us?”
He should have been out buying presents for his kids but he had watched her father for 10 whole months, she said.
This was “not organised overnight”, she said, given a tracker was put on her father’s car, which she and her young son travelled in.
She imagined he and others convicted in connection with her father’s murder “feel very stupid” for several reasons, including that DNA had been found on laptops.
There is “not an ounce of intelligence among you, you have destroyed our lives and your own”, she said.
She told McGovern he is “now going to jail for life, hopefully, and for killing an innocent man”.
All her father was guilty of was attending a childhood friend’s funeral. It is not the people who are killed that suffer, she said. Her family did not get a trial and the accused had shown no remorse. She asked everyone to think about the criminal organisation McGovern was working for.
