The death of Joe Deacy: A five-year blur of grief and unanswered questions

“Getting on that plane to Knock is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” says Charlotte Harper of her recent visit to Mayo for the fifth anniversary vigil for her brother Joseph, who was killed after a violent assault for which no one has been held accountable.

She always calls her brother by his full name, while other family members and friends refer to him as Joe, a sunny West Ham fan with an uncommonly deep affinity with the county of his paternal grandparents. The Irish passport for which he had applied was processed and posted out shortly after his death, in August 2017, at the age of 21. He had spoken of his plans to move to Mayo and made the short flight from London to the west of Ireland as though he was hopping on a Tube. He played Gaelic football with a local club near St Alban’s, in Hertfordshire, northwest of London, where he grew up. His teenage years coincided with the gripping period of Mayo’s enduring All-Ireland quest and he attended several of the county team’s big All-Ireland days. Aidan O’Shea was his idol. He practically knew the London-Knock flight times by heart and was familiar with the Bohola-Swinford hinterland. Because he had such an outgoing disposition, he made friendships easily. He considered himself a Mayo man who just happened to have been brought up in England. And there is a small army of those.

The terrible details of Joe’s last hours in Mayo have been chronicled in the reportage around the commemorative climb of Croagh Patrick and the Gaelic football match held in the county on the weekend of Saturday August 13th. A crowd of about 150 people also made the walk that day along the road to the house on the grounds of which Joe was found early on the Saturday morning of August 12th, 2017.

[ Joe Deacy death: Inquest hears Garda murder investigation ‘ongoing’ ]

For most of what was his final visit to Ireland, Joe had been staying with Michelle Deacy and her family on one of his regular visits to her home in Galway. Officially, they were second cousins, but her children were in and around the same age as Joe; he was regarded as part of the family. Michelle dropped him to the bus that Friday, August 11th. His plan was to head up to Swinford and return that evening. He later texted to say he would stay for the night in Mayo with a friend, a young man from the locality. He spent the evening socialising in Kiltimagh and he and his friend were dropped to the house; two other occupants were there. Joe and his friend remained up late into the night, with Joe engaging in good-humoured back-and-forth exchanges with friends, including Michelle’s children, on social media. His last message, on Snapchat, was at around 3.45am: Joe sent a short video shot inside the house. His friend is in the background. The mood is easy-going. “Keep it down, Joe. Keep it down,” a voice says at one stage. The exchanges wound down just before 4am — everyone was ready to sleep.

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At about 7.45am, Michelle received an alarmed phone call from her sister Dee, a nurse who works in Mayo University Hospital in Castlebar, who said that Joe had been in an accident and urged her to get to the hospital. Even then, nothing about the details, sketchy as they were, made sense. An early morning cyclist passing the house in which Joe was staying had noticed someone lying on the driveway and called the occupant of the house to alert them. Calls were then put through to the emergency services and Swinford Garda station, and Joe was taken to the hospital in Castlebar at around seven that morning.

Michelle was en route with her children when her sister phoned again, distraught, to say that Joe was not going to make it. She had to stop the car. “I will carry those wails to my grave,” Michelle says now. The Deacy family say that Joe was wearing just boxer shorts in the emergency department — his outer clothes were missing. But he had been fully clothed when the paramedics arrived at the house; they are uncertain what happened to the clothes he was wearing. When Michelle arrived at the hospital she was met by the consultant and a member of the Garda who would later function as liaison officer for the family.

“And I was told that Joe had injuries consistent with a bad beating or a car accident. He looked so peaceful, but he had a black eye and a gash on the left side and blood on his nose. First, the guards were saying it was a fall. I checked his hands and there were no marks. And he looked so peaceful I pleaded with him to just wake up. The nurse came in then and she said, look it, he is not going to. They decided they were going to take him to Beaumont, and I thought, ‘maybe’. But really it was to keep him alive until [his father] Adrian and the family got there and for organ donation.”

From the beginning, the family feels there was a clear disparity between the medical evidence and the initial Garda belief that he had suffered his injuries as the result of an accidental fall.

“I came out of ICU, and I went straight to the guard, and I pleaded with her,” recalls Michelle.

“I said, ‘this is not a fall.’ And she said that crime scene is happy that it was a fall.”

When it happened, I thought, well, it’s an open-and-shut case or the perpetrators will confess. But it dragged on and on. And then you would start to lose hope

His phone was taken by gardaí and the family has not been told whether it might contain any messages relevant to his final hours — or if the location services were engaged to establish his precise location before he was killed. Joe’s parents, Adrian and Alison, and sister arrived in Dublin on Saturday afternoon. He died in Beaumont Hospital on Sunday evening. A postmortem was conducted on Monday by then State Pathologist Marie Cassidy. On Tuesday, the liaison officer visited Michelle to say the case was now classed as a murder investigation. Adrian remembers those initial hours as a haze and summoning the strength to talk about it is a profoundly difficult experience. He cannot read any newspaper article which contains a photograph of Joe, limiting himself to printed transcripts. He daily sees young men on the street who remind him of his son.

“When it happened, I thought, well, it’s an open-and-shut case or the perpetrators will confess. But it dragged on and on. And then you would start to lose hope. And then you would meet the guards and would come out of that meeting convinced that they were on the right path and dedicated, and you would be full of hope again.”

Two men were arrested on November 15th, 2017, in connection with the investigation. They were released without charge.

“And then you would wait another six months and meet again, and you would be offered little crumbs. After the file went to the DPP and nobody was charged, we assumed that the next step was to have an inquest. But instead of that, they said they would put a completely different investigative team on it. The previous team was on it for over three years.”

The last five years have passed by in a blur of grief and frustration and unanswered questions for the Deacy family. They believe that Joe has been failed by the State.

The thought of Joe lying alone outside is one of the images that constantly troubles Michelle.

A second private postmortem was later conducted on Joe: it surprised the family to know that this could be done without their consent. The results were not made known to them.

“That is the first question I asked,” Adrian says.

“It is quite common over here [in England], less common in Ireland. But you are allowed to do it.”

To hear Adrian Deacy’s undiluted English accent is to be reminded that this is an emigrant story. Adrian’s parents, Martin and Anne, were among the generation of mid-century Mayo people who spent their lives away from the county without ever abandoning it spiritually. They arrived in London as teenagers, met in the teeming city and made a home there. Anne’s Mayo accent never faded — if anything, it deepened in her later years. Adrian’s childhood summers revolved around the emigrant rite of passage: the drive to Holyhead; the ferry, six weeks with the cousins and then back to the city. The remoteness, the greenness, the stillness, the Angelus, the country scents and sounds were an escapism. Adrian enjoyed it. But he was a Londoner — a West Ham devotee. Once he hit his teens, he didn’t “go back” as much. Much later, he took his children on shorter visits, often to stay with Michelle’s family. Still, he was primarily a Londoner. Charlotte was the same. It was Joe, for some reason, who embraced his Irish heritage with a passion.

“He got along with everyone,” Charlotte says.

“He was laddish in that he enjoyed hanging around with boys and going drinking and playing sports and all that. But he never let anyone feel left out. He was quite happy when we went to visit grandparents to go and have a drink with their friends. He was so good at it. I never used to go to family parties without him — so I never really had to know who anyone was. Because Joe would say that’s so and so, and we are related to him or her that way and she is so-and-so’s daughter. And in the intervening years, I realised that I didn’t know who everyone was, and Joseph was no longer there to tell me. I had lost my tour guide in a way.”

We were all very close in Mayo and we have a number of cousins around Bohola and Swinford, but that is a love affair that has gone sour now. It is very hard to go back there now

The August vigil was Charlotte’s first visit to Mayo since the first anniversary of her brother’s death. She decided not to climb Croagh Patrick but was among the group of 150 who walked to the house where Joe had been found.

“I don’t really remember doing it the first time around four years ago. Because it was just too much and that was part of the reason I wanted to go again this time. Whereas my mum and dad didn’t — for very good reasons. And it took me a long time, even when we got to the house, to turn myself around and to look at [the] front driveway where Joseph was found. And it is just heartbreaking. The heartbreak this time was tinged with just an anger. At how we still have to do this, five years on.”

Mayo formed a vital part of Charlotte Harper’s childhood narrative, too, but much of that has been subsumed by the nightmarish experience of the past five years. Sometimes she can almost hear her brother defending the place, arguing that she shouldn’t blame the locality. But one of the most hurtful, painful aspects has been an understandable sense of abandonment in the locality that the Deacys cherished. Joe was killed violently. Life has carried on as normal afterwards. Family and friends of Joe say it’s hard to avoid the conclusion there is a feeling he somehow didn’t matter.

“It has made life difficult for anyone related to us,” says Adrian.

“I don’t know why — is it because he is from England, is it because it is the country mentality, let it go away and stick our head in the sand. I honestly don’t know. At the walk, Gerry [Adrian’s cousin] said there was very few people there from Swinford or Bohola, other than family and friends. Your average person does not want to know. And it is a horrible thing to say, but I am delighted Mum and Dad are dead. Because this would have killed them. Absolutely.”

Other difficulties have nagged at them. After the first anniversary, a floral wreath forming the words “Justice for Joe” vanished within a week of being laid. In 2019, Mayo County Council instructed the family to remove the roadside memorials they had erected, citing a lack of planning permission and that they presented “a visual distraction to passing motorists”. The Deacys pointed out that similar monuments exist on roadsides throughout the country; the council later removed the monuments with the explanation that its action was based on the receipt of public complaints over a six-month period. At the vigil in 2020, Paul Deacy, an uncle of Joe’s, told the Mayo News that he believed “a veil of silence” had fallen over the local community.

“We were all very close in Mayo and we have a number of cousins around Bohola and Swinford, but that is a love affair that has gone sour now. It is very hard to go back there now.”

Charlotte Harper believes that communications between her family and the Garda investigative team is better than ever before. And the support the family has received from across Mayo has been heartening. The county remains the place that Joe loved most, and his relatives associate some of their best memories of him with Carragolda, where the home place is.

“It’s where I was born,” says Michelle Deacy.

“Joe spent time there every year. My kids love it. And I still love Carragolda. But it makes me sad driving through Bohola every time I go down.”

On some visits, Joe would have Michelle’s mum, a widow, collect him at Knock airport and would stay the night with her at the home place. Chicken stew was a favourite. Michelle phoned one evening to learn that her mother was teaching her visitor how to navigate a Rubik’s Cube. “They were such an odd couple,” says Adrian. “But they got on so well. That’s how Joe was.”

The Deacy family is determined that the vigils will continue until someone is held accountable. The whole terrible experience has, at least for the time being, changed what Mayo means to Joe’s immediate family.

“Yeah. It can’t not have done,” says Charlotte.

“I obviously didn’t go there anywhere near as much as my brother. Now, it is completely wrapped up in the events of August 2017. I have a few times been to Dublin because we go to the yearly organ donor celebration mass. And that’s helped. But again, getting on that plane is so wrapped up with my brother. We often say that we should probably go and do something not Joseph-related. Because it is not the country’s fault. But I just think that for now, that would be too hard to do.”