A former soldier accused of murder accepted in court yesterday that he had killed 18-month-old Oisín Reilly-Murphy. When he took the stand, Mr John Reilly was asked: "Have you accepted with certainty that you killed Oisín?"
"Yes," he replied.
Mr Patrick Marrinan SC, defending, asked if there was any reason deep down why he had killed Oisín. "No," Mr Reilly replied. Asked how he felt about Oisín, he said: "As I would about any child, that they are children . . . that they ought to be raised properly, protected."
Mr Reilly (32), Crooksling, Brittas, Co Dublin, denies murdering Oisín Reilly-Murphy, Manor Kilbride, Co Wicklow, on June 5th, 2000, at Jobstown, Tallaght, Co Dublin. The defence is that of sane automatism, whereby a person with no history of psychiatric disturbance commits a purposeless act of which there is no memory.
The court has heard that the baby was stabbed to death in the sitting-room of the house of his cousin and his wife, Mr Hugh and Mrs Siobhán Reilly. The accused man and the child's parents - Hugh's brother Mr Tommy Reilly and his partner Ms Gráinne Murphy - had stayed overnight there and had spent the evening drinking and playing cards. Mr John Reilly was on leave from Iraq, where he had been working as a UN sanctions inspector.
He told the jury he could not remember seeing Oisín that evening. He had arrived close to midnight on July 4th, 2000, and joined Oisín's parents and Mr Hugh and Mrs Siobhán Reilly in the kitchen. He recalled having a couple of cans of beer after which he thought he had a can of cider. Mr Hugh Reilly then produced a bottle of poitín, but he could not say exactly how much he drank.
He remembered walking from the kitchen to the hallway. Asked if he recalled lying down on the sitting-room couch, he said he did not remember specifically. The next thing he remembered was standing in the sitting-room the next morning "looking down" and hearing crying all around him, "hearing Tommy and Gráinne crying about Oisín had been killed . . . and Hughie and Siobhán trying to understand what had happened".
He recalled among the "crying, the anger and the confusion", the others looking at him "in a way that said to me, 'It's your fault'." Later in the Garda station during his brother's visit it began to dawn on him that he could be responsible.
Earlier, a medical witness told the court that sleepwalking, night terrors or a combination may have caused Mr Reilly's actions. Sleep disorders could have been triggered by heavy amounts of alcohol.
Dr Hugh Staunton, neurologist and lecturer at the College of Surgeons, said there could be an overlap of these type of behaviours. It was also possible that someone sleepwalking could carry out complicated acts, such as getting a knife out of one's pocket. In sane automatism, he said, the act was done automatically, as though the person was on auto-pilot.
The trial resumes on Monday.