ANTHONY G MURPHY:RETIRED Circuit Court judge Anthony G (Tony) Murphy, who has died aged 81, was a no-nonsense member of the judiciary with a strong personal sense of justice, crime and punishment.
Following a lucrative career at the Bar in Cork, he was appointed to the Circuit Court in 1985, establishing a reputation as a decisive and resolute judge.
Presiding over criminal cases, he had an astute eye as to how sentences would play out with the public and was sensitive to the requirement that judgments be seen as punitive and/or deterrent.
A devoted family man, he was the best of company.
A close friend of former taoiseach Jack Lynch, who had practised with him at the Bar in Cork, he was a fine singer, amateur actor and lover of music. For many years he was chairman of Cork Operatic Society. His interests included golf, horses and sailing.
From Christian Brothers College in Cork, he went to St Vincent’s College in Dublin before studying for the Bar at the King’s Inns.
On his appointment to the Circuit Court he was determined to make an impact on crime in Cork. Despite though his principled and, perhaps, paternalistic defence of law and order, on retiring he admitted to a sense of failure as crime levels had increased during his time on the bench.
In reality, however, the increase mirrored changing social conditions as heroin flooded Cork, triggering an upsurge in crime.
A traditional judge, he saw property rights as the cornerstone of the social system. He had a knack of not having to say what he was thinking during a case but could convey in subtle ways how things were progressing. If he told a witness “you can go down now”, the barrister knew the case was lost.
As a judge, he was not afraid to criticise State institutions. In 1997 he excoriated the Department of the Marine for failing to avert a fatal ferry accident in 1994 when four people drowned at Castletownbere, among them an 11-year-old girl and her father.
Controversially, in a big drugs case in 1998, he barred the media from contemporaneous reporting, a ruling overturned by the Supreme Court. While the decision came too late to affect the proceedings, it reasserted the constitutional position of justice being done in the public eye.
In 1999, he sentenced James Kelly (74), known as Brother Ambrose, to 36 years in jail for sexual assault on former residents of Lota, a Brothers of Charity centre in Cork. The abuse, he said, had rendered his victims’ lives “little short of a permanent crucifixion”, but he fixed a review date of 18 months on his record sentence. However, when that date came around, Kelly was then serving a three-year jail term for sexually assaulting 10 boys at Renmore, Galway.
Jailing a farmer for five years in 2000 for deliberately infecting cattle with BSE to claim compensation, he described the crime as “on a par with the most serious trials” he had encountered.
He was most at home in the company of fellow lawyers and was regarded among his peers as the doyen of the profession.
Predeceased by his youngest son, Anthony, he is survived by his wife Dorothea (Dot) and sons Simon, Jerry and Adam.
Judge AG Murphy: born September 1st, 1930; died October 16th, 2011.