Tim Drennan is the sort of man you would expect to find sitting quietly with neighbours in The Fountain bar in Mountrath’s Market Square in Co Laois playing cards, or chatting about Ballyglass Beauty, the horse owned by some of the pub’s regulars.
Instead, he is with members of his family shortly after opening time in the pub, a room palely lit by bright February sunshine, to talk about his son Joe who was killed by hit-and-run driver Kieran Fogarty in Limerick in the autumn of 2023.
“I never wanted the limelight, I do not,” he says firmly, but he does want justice – a justice the family do not believe they received when Fogarty was sentenced last week by Judge Colin Daly at Limerick Circuit Criminal Court.
Joe Drennan, a journalism student in the University of Limerick, was returning to his lodgings on October 13th, 2023, after an evening shift in a local restaurant when he was struck by Fogarty.
Fogarty, now 21, a gangland criminal with scores of convictions already behind him, had filmed himself driving a BMW 5 Series at 122km/hour in a 50km/hour speed zone shortly before he broke a red light, collided with a car and struck Drennan. He left the young student pinned underneath the car, dying.
Offering no aid to the dying student, Fogarty tried to clear his DNA traces from the car before fleeing. He later rejected his mother’s pleas later to go to the Garda and hand himself in.
“I don’t even think they know it was me,” he told her by text.
The grief felt by Tim Drennan, his wife Marguerite, his youngest child Sarah, Marguerite’s mother Vera and her sisters, Lisa, Carol and Joanne comes in gusts.
“That’s it, gusts – that’s the word,” says Marguerite, describing the pain left by the loss of her son.
Joe is buried in the cemetery about 13km “out the road” in Camross, near the home where she and Tim reared their family after returning from England.
For hours, they talk about Joe. They share pictures and memories, each one joyful. They show that “the baby in the family” had been pampered, spoilt “but never ruined”, that he had been loved and had returned love in spades.
Though tearful about the loss of his son, Tim Drennan cannot help but laugh as he tells the story of the morning the 14-year-old Joe drove the family car around the yard while his parents were still in bed. “He went round four times,” he says.
“And then all we heard was, ‘Dad!’. He had driven into the shed,” says Tim, in a story that reflects the relationship between a father and son who could share everything.
“Joe could tell him anything, anything,” says Marguerite.
“He didn’t shout for me because he knew I would have killed him for taking the car, but he knew he could shout for his dDad,” she adds, smiling at the memory.
Reaching into a pocket, Tim pulls out a mobile to find a WhatsApp message he sent in June 2023, just a few months before Joe was killed, in response to his son telling his mother he was short of cash.
In a 10pm message, his father wrote: “Hi Joe, Marguerite told me about your financial issues. Son, don’t worry, I have had them all my life. Don’t be short of money. Just let us know what you need and we’ll get it fixed up”.
His son replied shortly after 8am the following day: “Thank you, Dad, appreciate it. Are you excited for me to come home? Ha, ha.”
The phone shows scores of such messages have been saved.
Happy to spend money when he had it, his son was not shy about work, getting a job within minutes in the La Cucina restaurant in Castletroy, Co Limerick, near the university after he dropped in one day.
His habit of doodling images of cats is remembered today in the restaurant, with images of them on its walls. One of his aunts has a copy of one tattooed on her wrist.
His family share similar memories, collapsing in laughter as they tell stories of the tuck shop that Joe “ran from his schoolbag” in the local secondary school, Mountrath Community School.
Knowing well what he was doing, the school’s janitor, who had to clear up the trail left by his sales, came to his grandmother, Vera.
“Would you tell him now to stop selling those lollipops,” she remembers the janitor telling her.
Joe had been due back in Mountrath within days of the collision that took his life, “if only to collect his 21st birthday presents”, jokes his aunt, Lisa, “because he was going to England for something”.
Fogarty ended the prospect of that.
His sister, Sarah, who spoke to the court in December when Fogarty’s sentence was being considered, has taken time off from work in a childcare centre in Portlaoise.
“With children you have to laugh, to smile. It’s only fair, and it’s hard to do that right now,” she says.
Even today, the family struggle with the night of Joe’s death because so many of them were away. His parents were on holiday in Lanzarote, his aunt Carol was in France at the Rugby World Cup. Sarah was the only one at home when gardaí called.
She was the one taken by gardaí to Limerick. She was the one who identified the body as her brother, Joe, whom she calls “my best friend – the one you could say anything to”.
The Drennan family are deeply critical of the 6½-year jail sentence handed down by Judge Daly to Fogarty, of Hyde Road, Ballinacurra Weston, Limerick, after he pleaded guilty to dangerous driving causing Drennan’s death, failing to remain at the scene of the fatal collision, failing to assist Drennan and failing to alert the emergency services.
“We have respect for the guards, the lads in Limerick did everything that they could do to bring Fogarty to justice. Everything. But what justice did they get, never mind us?” says Joe’s aunt, Lisa.
For all of the love for and memories they have of Joe, they share an anger towards Fogarty, but mostly towards the State, especially Judge Daly. It is an anger that brought them out on the streets to a protest at the University of Limerick on Thursday where they called publicly on the Director of Public Prosecutions to appeal the sentence.
“I just have a full head of anger in me,” says Tim Drennan.
“I came back last week in the car from Limerick and I had my eyes wide open the whole time, and I saw nothing. I couldn’t take it in.”
He had stood up to question the judge moments after he had said Fogarty’s 6½-year sentence for killing Joe would run concurrently along with an eight-year sentence for firing shots at a wall near children six months before he killed Joe.
In effect, Fogarty will serve not a single day more for killing Drennan.
Earlier in his sentencing, Judge Daly had said the sentences would run consecutively, not concurrently, but the judge later corrected himself.
On hearing the change to concurrent, Tim recalls the prosecuting counsel being “nearly vicious” when he heard the judge correct his earlier decision and the prosecuting counsel questioning whether the judge had, in fact, said “consecutively”.
“Are you telling me that he won’t serve a day for killing Joe?” Tim asked the judge.
Joe’s father has asked the same question every second of every day since, fearing that it will be a question he will ask forever.
“Fogarty had five seconds to do anything before he hit my son, but the judge had seven weeks to make up his mind,” he says.
“Seven weeks – for that,” says the quietly-spoken father as he shakes his head in despair.
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