A motorist has been sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to dangerous driving causing the death of a younger brother. The Circuit Criminal Court in Tralee heard yesterday that he was "like a son to him".
Judge Carroll Moran said it was "an especially sad" case. He also banned him from driving for 20 years.
Thomas McDonagh (47), Ballyduff, Co Kerry, also of Liverpool, a father of 11 children aged between 23 and 10 years, also pleaded guilty to driving with excess alcohol, having no insurance and no driving licence on December 17th, 2006, at Direenacullig, on the Kilgarvan-Killarney road. His brother Martin (31), a father of five and a front-seat passenger, died at the scene.
Martin McDonagh was the third member of the 12-member McDonagh family to die in a road traffic incident, the court was told.
The court heard the dead man's widow, Anne Marie McDonagh (28) who was five months pregnant at the time, now found life very difficult having to rear their children aged from nine to 10 months without their father.
Sgt Niall Crowley of Kanturk Garda station said the two brothers and their two wives had gone to a pub in Kenmare and the men had a considerable amount to drink.
At 11.30pm a Garda patrol car spotted that the car driven by McDonagh was over the white line. It had almost collided with two oncoming vehicles. They also spotted the car doing a U-turn manoeuvre.
The Garda car pursued the vehicle but the driver did not stop. It went through Kilgarvan village at a speed of up to 140 km/h. It was going at such speed that gardaí in the patrol car decided it was too dangerous to pursue it closely.
They radioed ahead so that a checkpoint could be set up at Loo bridge on the main Cork-Killarney road and a stinger applied to stop the vehicle.
The Garda car lost sight of the speeding car, but some distance from Kilgarvan found it overturned. It had crossed the road, hit a rock outcrop and flipped over. The passenger side was extensively damaged.
Three years previously, another McDonagh brother was killed in a car crash in Northern Ireland. A sister in Limerick had also died in a car crash, senior counsel for McDonagh, Brendan Nix told Judge Carroll Moran.
Because of the previous road traffic deaths in his family, Thomas McDonagh was all too aware of the pain he had caused.
Judge Moran said it was "an extremely sad case". It was "a completely needless loss of life" and he offered condolences to the dead man's widow and children. He also accepted it was hard for the accused too as the two brothers were very close.
Drink and speed were aggravating factors in the case and he had to impose a jail sentence, although he accepted that members of the Travelling community found prison much more difficult.