In the first of a series, we take a look back at some major news stories from Meath in days gone by.

Firstly; The Murder Of Una Lynskey in Ratoath in October 1971.

On a clear October night in 1971, an attractive young woman journeying home from her job in Dublin stepped off a commuter bus in rural Co Meath. As on most evenings, she stopped to chat with her cousin for a few moments, recounting the day’s events. Saying her goodbyes, she then turned to make her way down the dark, winding laneway that led to her family home. She was never seen alive again.

Two months later the skeletal remains of Una Lynskey a civil servant, who was from Ratoath, were found in the Dublin mountains.

Suspicion for her murder quickly locked onto three young men from the town: Martin Kerrigan, Dick Donnelly and Martin Conmey. The men were arrested, detained at Trim Garda Station and questioned. Forty-eight hours later, they were released, Conmey and Kerrigan having made statements which placed them on Porterstown Lane during the crucial fifteen-minute period in which Ms Lynskey disappeared, having stepped off her bus at 6.55pm and started the short walk to her home.

All three men claimed that while in detention they had been ill-treated and had made their statements under extreme duress. The case was being handled by the infamous “murder squad,” a team of garda detectives which investigated practically every serious crime in Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s.

Attitudes to the “squad” veered from commendations for their work to allegations of brutality. (An Amnesty International investigation, which examined twenty-eight cases between April, 1976 and May, 1977, concluded that there was pushing and shoving, severe beatings, water and sleep deprivation.)

On December 10, Una’s body was found. A Dublin County Council workman noticed something buried beneath fir bushes at Glendough in the Dublin mountains. Thinking the pile was the remains of a sheep, he moved the covering with his shovel and revealed a human skull. Subsequent examination failed to establish a cause of death, but the absence of fractures ruled out the possibility that Una had been hit by a car.

Now Una’s body was found, tensions grew higher in her home area. The atmosphere was one of anger, and it was obvious something serious was about to happen. Such was the concern that a local garda was asked to safeguard the security of the three young men who had been questioned.

Nine days after Una was found, Martin Kerrigan was abducted and savagely murdered. He had been drinking with friends on a Sunday afternoon in Ratoath, and was fairly intoxicated when he left the bar and was spotted in the street by Garda Harty of Ashbourne. The guard spotted a potential flashpoint; Una’s boyfriend Paddy Kelly and other men were sitting in a car parked down the street.

In order to avoid a row the guard offered Martin and his friends a lift to the dance they planned to attend that night. En route, however,he came across the scene of an accident and left the car while he took the two drivers into a nearby house to sort out details of what had happened. Martins friends got out of the garda car and walked on, leaving him alone in the vehicle.

A few minutes later two cars pulled up. One was driven by Una’s cousin John Gaughan and the other by her boyfriend Patrick Kelly. Una’s brothers John and James were in Gaughan’s car. They stopped alongside the garda car, dragged out Marty Kerrigan and forced him into John’s car.

Martin Kerrigan, who was never charged in relation to Una Lynskey’s disappearance, protested his innocence to the last. His lifeless, mutilated body was found in Tibradden the following morning at the exact spot where Una Lynskey’s body had been uncovered a week earlier. He had been strangled and violently assaulted. An attempt had been made to castrate him after he was dead.

In May 1972, Una Lynskey’s brothers Sean and James and their cousin Patrick Gaughan were convicted of the manslaughter of Martin Kerrigan and sentenced to three years in prison. At their trial the men affirmed that they never meant to kill Kerrigan, and when they left him in Tibradden he was still alive and bodily intact.

Barely a month later, Dick Donnelly and Martin Conmey went on trial for the murder of Una Lynskey. The trial was almost derailed completely when both the accused and several witnesses openly disputed statements and depositions they had given. After a 13-day trial, Conmey and Donnelly were convicted of Una Lynskey’s murder.

However a year later, Donnelly successfully appealed his conviction. Martin Conmey, though, was convicted and served three years in prison. He was 20-years-old at the time.

In November, 2010, nearly four decades after the disappearance of Una Lynskey, the Court of Criminal Appeal exonerated Conmey and quashed his conviction. The court found that early statements taken from witnesses Martin Madden and Sean Reilly, which tended to favour Conmey, were not disclosed to the defence and were radically inconsistent with later statements of the same witnesses and evidence given at the trial.

Four years later, the same court declared Martin Conmey’s 1972 conviction to be a Miscarriage of Justice.

Forty five years on the mystery of who killed Una Lynskey has yet to be solved.

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