An inquest which had been adjourned following the intervention of a mother who believed her son could not have been the driver of the car in which he died was reopened yesterday in Cork.
Mrs Terri O'Brien said that it would be totally out of character for her son to drive a car after he had been drinking.
After hearing Garda evidence that Darragh O'Brien (21) was on the passenger side of the crashed vehicle, the Cork City Coroner, Mr Cornelius Riordan, agreed to adjourn the inquest and said that he would issue a witness summons for the owner of the car, Mr John O'Driscoll, to appear before him.
Yesterday, after an hour-long hearing, the coroner said that there was a "very high probability" that Mr O'Driscoll, from Lagan Grove, Mayfield, Cork, who had claimed he was the passenger at the time of the collision, was in fact the driver.
Mr O'Driscoll, in evidence, denied driving. He said that his normal practice when drinking was to leave the car and get a taxi home. He said that on the day of the accident, August 31st, 1996, he drank at least six pints of lager.
He remembered throwing his car keys on the counter of the pub in which he was drinking with Darragh O'Brien. After that, he remembered nothing until he crawled out of the car.
The inquest was told that Mr O'Brien, of Lagan Grove, was killed when the car hit a ditch at 6.45 p.m. that evening.
Ms Breda Galway, of Blarney, said in evidence that she was driving in Glanmire when a car came towards her at speed on the wrong side of the road. It hit a ditch, went up in the air and landed upside down, with the passenger side against the ditch. She helped a man - Mr O'Driscoll - to crawl out of the driver's side and noticed another person hanging out of the passenger window.
She heard Mr O'Driscoll say to a fireman: "The shagger couldn't take the bend."
Mr O'Driscoll said he and Mr O'Brien had worked together on a building site that morning, after which they went to a bar in Riverstown, where they both had a lot to drink. They travelled there in his car and he drove it himself. However, he could not recall leaving the bar.
Replying to Mr Paul Clune, solicitor for the O'Brien family, Mr O'Driscoll said he would not have driven. "I was worse than he was", he said.
Mr Clune said that the dead man had a "rigorous regime" of not driving after drinking and he had been found on the passenger side of the car.
A pathology report showed that Mr O'Brien died of a broken neck.
The coroner said that the two men had made the "cardinal error" of taking their car with them. Certainly, Mr O'Driscoll had been "very, very drunk". It would be up to another court to decide who was driving the car, but the probability was very high that it was Mr O'Driscoll.
A verdict was returned in accordance with the medical evidence that Mr O'Brien died from a broken neck sustained in the collision.