Court 19 became a scrum yesterday as a young girl, a minor, was due to give evidence
COURTROOMS ARE routinely witness to tragedy. The sheer mundanity of it for regulars undoubtedly obscures the terrible suffering being endured by people on every side.
Yesterday, as the now customary queue built up soon after 9am outside Court 19 and the more excitable participants stood ready to engage in the scrum for seats, the human reality of the DPP v Eamonn Lillis seemed a long way off.
The back row of the limited public seating area, reserved here for the stoical family of Celine Cawley, becomes an overhang for the throng standing behind, some dangling plastic bags before them.
For the Garda investigators, temporarily granted exclusive use of a corner behind the exhibits desk, yesterday marked a deterioration. To relieve the congestion around the door, the trial judge, Mr Justice Barry White, sensibly suggested that people fan out along the walls around the Garda area.
The reason for the scrum?
A young girl, a minor, whose father is accused of murdering her mother, was scheduled to give evidence. Her father, Eamonn Lillis, sellotaped his broken glasses as the three large video screens lit up and relayed images from within the courtroom. Judge and counsel removed their wigs and gowns to meet the requirement for child witnesses, after which a technician pressed a button, triggering a ringtone in court and a phone call – captioned “Call to child witness room” on the screens – elsewhere in the complex.
The six men and six women of the jury gazed at the seven desktop screens they shared. Mr Lillis, usually notable for his expressionless, head-down demeanour, raised his eyes to the screen behind the judge and kept them there, shifting uneasily and ruffling his hair, as his 17-year-old daughter walked into the picture before him.
“Do you mind if I call you [her first name]?” asked prosecution counsel Mary Ellen Ring. The girl nodded brightly: “Go ahead.”
She seemed to remember very little of a conversation she had with her father on her return from a post-Christmas trip to Austria, just a few weeks after the violent death of her mother.
“It had been the world’s worst Christmas for me,” she said when asked to recall the details, and why she was hazy about a Garda statement given a few months later. “I just remember they had a fight and that was it . . .”
Prompted to recall her father’s story about a burglary, she became more animated: “He said he just panicked and did it for me. I don’t really appreciate that he did it,” she said firmly.
Ms Ring probed ever more gently about his concealment of clothing. No, she couldn’t recall that. “He said he felt sorry for what he did and asked could he [sic] forgive me [sic] . . . I said ‘Yes’ but I couldn’t really forgive him for the lie.”
Her father fixed his eyes on his daughter’s image as his defence counsel, Brendan Grehan, took over. He introduced himself. “My name is Brendan Grehan and I’m representing your Dad, and I am on strict instructions to keep you there for as short a time as possible”, he said lightly.
Suddenly, her face broke into a broad and beautiful smile.
“You’re 18 next birthday?” he asked. “Yeah.”
“And your Dad was in charge, in prison, when you were in Austria?” “Yeah.”
“You told the guards that Mum and Dad had a fight?” “Yeah.”
Counsel read from part of her statement, recalling that her father had told her that her Mum had slipped and hit her head off a brick. “Yeah.”
“That she [her mother] had picked up the brick after she’d fallen and turned and hit him with the brick?” “Yeah.”
“He told you he panicked?” counsel asked. “Pretty much, yeah,” she said, adding, “He did.”
He drew her gently back to her earlier statement that she had not appreciated being told that he did it for her. “I was always brought up never to lie. So I really didn’t appreciate that he did it for me. But I understand why he panicked, to save him.”
It was all over by 11.33am; less than 15 minutes. Some onlookers hung around for the legal argument that occupied the longueur up to lunchtime. Far from easing off, the afternoon crowd was even larger than the morning’s. A hapless security officer had to physically restrain people bulldozing their way through the single door, amid pushing, ill-tempered exchanges and one dramatic shriek.
When the Deputy State Pathologist took the stand, Eamonn Lillis’s head was bowed as both he and Celine Cawley’s family heard Dr Michael Curtis refer to her light hazel eyes, good natural teeth, stretch marks, the hospital identity bracelets on each ankle – and his view that her life could have been saved had she received prompt medical aid.