The case against Pádraig Nally in the main, was Nally's own "ungarnished painfully honest" statements. The 61-year-old, single farmer was the only witness to the violent struggle between himself and John Ward, a Traveller, a father of 11 and a man with a troubled psychiatric history. Suspicion and paranoia were factors in the crime according to the defence, writes Kathy Sheridan.
Mr Ward had racked up 12 separate sets of convictions and was due to face charges of swinging a slash-hook at gardaí investigating the theft of a fireplace.
On the day of his death, he had also taken what defence counsel Brendan Grehan described as a "cocktail of drugs - some legal, some not". They included opiates, cannabis and tranquillisers.
Months before John Ward turned up at Nally's farmhouse, Nally claimed to have seen the Galway-based Traveller four or five times at or near his premises. Even since the burglary of a chainsaw from the back toilet of his home, his door being kicked in and personal possessions tossed around in February 2004, Nally had been becoming increasingly preoccupied, "agitated and fearful, even paranoid", said counsel, about his own safety and protecting his property.
The neglected 60-year-old single-barrelled shotgun he kept beside his bed had been kicked out of place by the burglars so that, for a time, he thought it had been stolen. When he found it under the bed, he moved it outside to the barn, because he said he was afraid that he might "be shot in my own bed".
Other things - a towing chain, vice-grips, wrenches - had been going missing from the 65-acre holding. "After the chainsaw," he told detectives, "they were making a barn of my house."
He began to note down the registration numbers of strange cars. A witness said they were written all over the house. One, which he had written in a pedigree bull catalogue, was of a car sighted twice in the area. The first time was by both Nally and a friend, Joe Concannon, when it entered and left Nally's yard suddenly and at speed; the second time was a few weeks later, 1.5 km (0.9 miles) away, by Concannon alone.
Concannon gave evidence that when he saw a photograph of John Ward after his death, he identified him as one of the men in that car.
A few weeks before the killing, Nally said that the "same men" were at his house in a black Ford, asking for directions to the lake. He claimed these were the same two men - John and Tom Ward - that he saw again in his yard on October 14th last year.
Witness after witness, including Nally's only sibling, Maureen, a teacher in Ballina, gave evidence about Nally's state of mind in the months leading up to the killing of John Ward. Before going anywhere, he had taken to throwing a bucket of water on the clay at the gate so that he could check for footprints when he returned. He had taken to sitting in the shed for up to five hours at a time, holding his gun. The farm was being neglected. He was sleeping for only a few hours in the night - the only time he seemed able to sleep soundly was when Maureen came to stay at the weekends. The weekend before the killing, after Maureen had left, he said that he cried. "I felt something was going to happen. If it didn't, I'd have to shoot myself the following weekend. The pressure had got to me."
He had had only one hour's sleep the night before he saw Tom Ward parked outside his premises, the car facing out with the engine running, at around 2pm on Thursday, October 14th. He asked Ward where his "mate" was. When Ward replied that he had gone for a look around the back, Nally said: "He won't be coming out again."
He went to get his shotgun from the barn, saw John Ward at his kitchen door, and was within four or five yards when he discharged the first shot, described to the court by State Pathologist, Prof Marie Cassidy, as "just a flesh injury, though it would have been painful and would have affected his mobility". According to Nally, a violent struggle then ensued, during which he gave John Ward a "heavy beating" with a 61cm (2ft) long, 25cm (2in) wide stick he used for mixing dog food: "It was like hitting a stone or a badger." In the meantime, he had heard Tom Ward driving away. The court would be told that Tom Ward drove "back and forth a few times", before driving to Headford Garda station.
While John Ward "tried to run or limp away", in the words of prosecution counsel Paul O'Higgins, Nally went to the barn to reload the shotgun. At that point, said Mr O'Higgins, summing up, Nally "knew that Tom Ward was gone and that John Ward was retreating seriously injured He could have driven away in his car. He could have inflicted some lesser injury. He'd won his fight "
According to counsel, "while Ward still had his back towards him, again from a distance of four or five yards, he shot him through the left shoulder and arm". This shot was fatal, according to Prof Cassidy, penetrating the arm, entering the left lung and damaging the heart. "The trajectory [of the shot] suggested that the gunman was above him and that [the victim] may have been bent over or was crouching down." A neighbour who overheard the shots believed that there was around a minute and three-quarters between the first and second shots.
After that, said Mr O'Higgins, "Nally picked him up and put him over a wall", before going to his neighbour's house to ring the guards.
"Pádraig Nally did not go looking for trouble; trouble came to him John Ward wasn't busting in the back door for the good of the community. Tom Ward was also there that day playing a role," said Brendan Grehan, summing up for the defence. He described Nally as "a law-abiding, upstanding member" of his community.
"Did he suddenly, after 60 years, become a murderer? They stole more than his chainsaw. They stole his peace of mind, they stole his contentment and something we all desire - a sense of security."
Making the case for self-defence, Mr Grehan said that Nally believed John Ward would kill him.
"The instinctive reaction of Pádraig Nally was borne out by everything we now know about John Ward," said Mr Grehan, noting Ward's history of violence, his convictions and the drugs found in his body. "Once Pádraig Nally discharged the first shot, the true nature of John Ward came out Pádraig Nally was fighting for his life. It was a 'him or me' situation He didn't know whether there might be others coming - reinforcements - and he followed John Ward out to the road, having reloaded his shotgun."
"That man," he concluded, pointing at Pádraig Nally, "is not a murderer. He is someone who, confronted with a set of circumstances, refused to lie down and play" with the people he believed were threatening his life.