Born: May 17th, 1950
Died: November 12th, 2022
Thomas O’Connell SC, familiarly known as Tommy, who has died aged 72 of a lung-related condition, was one of the finest barristers of his generation, and known particularly for his role in many of the most difficult prosecutions of the last 30 years. His unflappability in court was founded on meticulous preparation, with a recall of the tiniest detail that made his advocacy skills seem untutored.
In 1995, a moment of history passed almost unnoticed when he persuaded a jury that that a man had raped a prostitute. Under common law, a prostitute was defined as a woman offering herself for acts of common lewdness. As such, while a sex worker was protected against violence, her right to refuse sexual congress was more technical than real, and juries were reluctant to act on her testimony. That groundbreaking verdict was achieved not only through persuasive advocacy but also through his natural empathy with the woman in the case. To Tommy O’Connell she was a victim and deserved justice; her occupation was irrelevant. Witnesses who met him, even in the dire circumstances of sexual violence prosecutions, were reassured by that empathetic demeanour.
He appeared in many cases which intruded on the public consciousness. Acting for the defence of Brendan O’Donnell, charged with the triple murder of a woman, her child and a priest, he battled against a system that had not then introduced a diminished responsibility defence, unsuccessfully pleading disturbance of the accused’s mind. In the series of prosecutions arising from the murder of Veronica Guerin in June 1996, he was the junior on the prosecution team; but, as the extradition of suspects took time and as multiple trials and appeals rolled into the new century (with prosecuting counsel Eamon Leahy dying and prosecuting counsel Peter Charleton going to the bench), he ended up as leader of the prosecution team. In that role he was unassailable, knowing every facet of all that had gone before.
In the prosecution of Catherine Nevin, his speech to the jury in closing the case was a model of braiding together the individual strands of evidence into a persuasive proof of her guilt by circumstantial evidence, but it also demonstrated another mark of his advocacy – that of common sense. If people were to come forward and say that they had been asked to murder a businessman, he told the jury, those approached were not to be expected to be beyond potential reproach: “If you want someone murdered, you don’t go to your local parish priest and ask him if he has a curate available.”
In the Omagh bombing case, his meticulous closing for the prosecution, where he delineated all of the facts which as a matter of law could amount to corroboration of the evidence, were unfortunately bypassed by the Special Criminal Court’s judgment which introduced items of supposed corroboration of their own (including the accused’s prior conviction for a terrorist offence), thereby rendering the conviction unsound.
Tommy O’Connell was born in Limerick in 1950 and attended the Christian Brothers school in Sexton Street. After earning a history degree in Trinity College Dublin, he turned to law and was called to the Bar in 1976, becoming a pupil of Michael Moriarty. The real impetus to develop his career came when he met Charlotte von der Schulenburg, the daughter of Count Fritz von der Schulenburg, who had been executed for his part in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Their dynamic marriage included Charlotte’s four children from her previous marriage to Nick von Bielenberg, and O’Connell took up his new role with relish, as he put it himself, “like many young barristers, without a bean to our name”. Charlotte died of cancer in 2004. His empathy was demonstrated time and again to not only his family but to their wider circle, as he reached out to help friends in need of support. As a person grounded in history, it was a matter of particular pride to him that Charlotte was chosen by the Jewish community in Dublin to participate in commemorating the Holocaust.
His education never ended, his curiosity remained unbounded. To talk to him was to encounter a person who went beyond cynicism and constantly searched for the truth behind passing news. He often spoke about his history professors in Trinity, how the best of them found the patterns in what the past demonstrated, and this he applied to his analysis of current affairs. Every encounter with him was one of education, and even in his final illness he constantly read, although he lamented the erosion of his powers of concentration. It was that core of intelligence and open-mindedness which made him more than a mere lawyer; he was a person to whom juries responded readily, recognising that here was a genuine and trustworthy man.
He is survived by his stepchildren Andy, Kim, Jenny and Adam, their spouses and children, his partner Caroline and sister Brid.