Thomas McDonagh (29), who killed his father in Listowel last September, was yesterday given a seven-year sentence, with the last three suspended, on the third day of his trial for manslaughter at Tralee Circuit Criminal Court.
Judge Carroll Moran said that in old-fashioned language the crime would be called "parricide". In the time of the Old Testament it would be regarded as one of the most heinous.
During a row Mr Jeremiah McDonagh, the 55-year-old father, who was drunk at the time, had pushed Thomas, who caught up a chair in the sitting room of his father's house and threw it. Its leg went through his father's eye socket and deep into his brain. He died two days later in Tralee General Hospital. A rubber cap was removed from his brain at post-mortem.
The wound was of such severity there was no prospect of recovery, Dr Marie Cassidy, the Assistant State Pathologist, said in her report.
Judge Moran said Mr McDonagh had died prematurely and he offered condolences to the dead man's relatives and friends.
The judge said he wished to stress that, even though he was a heavy drinker, Mr McDonagh could have been expected to live another 20 years However, Thomas McDonagh had had a very unhappy life and had experienced "brutal neglect". This was not just from State institutions. He had also been abandoned by his parents.
Never in his 10 years in the Nazareth Home in Tralee, to which he had been sent at a few months old, had he received a visitor. Later he was sent to St Joseph's Industrial School in Salthill, Co Galway, from which he emerged at 15 without any education or without sitting any exams.
Judge Moran also took into account the fact that McDonagh had dialled 999 three times and had stayed with his injured father on the night of September 25th, as well as the guilty plea. There was no element of premeditation.
He had not been prosecuted for murder.
The trial changed dramatically earlier in the day when the fatal weapon, the orange and red tubular chair with steel legs, was being unwrapped before the jury.
There was talk of blood on the chair, and the rubber cap on one of the legs was missing.
As the chair was being brought forward, Thomas McDonagh stood up and called to Judge Moran: "Judge, I want to leave. I don't want to see it." He became upset and pale.
The trial was adjourned briefly and, when it resumed, McDonagh changed his plea to guilty, and the jury was discharged.
Det Sgt John Heaslip told the court McDonagh's interviews veered from moments of remorse to moments of bravado, from moments when he said he hoped "the f----r dies," to moments when he hoped he would live.
His senior counsel, Mr Brendan Nix, pleaded for mercy for his client who, he said, had done his best "to stop history repeating itself".
His late father had 65 convictions. His mother had left Thomas and his siblings, Mark and James, to enter another relationship. His father, who had served in the British army, was a chronic alcoholic.
Thomas had 22 convictions, but only one was for assault. Of late his crimes had also been drink-related. Two years ago he had put his own five children, now ranging in age from seven to 2½, into the care of the Southern Health Board when their mother, his partner, left.
He had hoped, by coming back to Listowel last autumn, to start a new life and to have a relationship with his father who had once disowned him and with whom there were always difficulties, and to get back his children.
The tragedy of his life was that, had he gone instead to Killarney, that new start might have been possible.
He was now left with a photograph of only two of his children.
Thomas McDonagh was a man who had done wrong, but he was not a hard man, Mr Nix said.
"While his vote is as valuable as mine, the State has singularly failed him. It failed to cherish him equally. Another prison for him is the fact he will not be seeing his children.
"With all the technology and all the Celtic Tigers, he is reduced to a photograph of two of his five children. One would have thought that in 2003 he would have been entitled to more than this," Mr Nix said in summing up to the court.
The sentence was backdated to last September, the time McDonagh has been in custody. Judge Moran recommended he receive counselling and vocational training. He refused leave to appeal the severity of the sentence.