A KERRY farmer has gone on trial at the Circuit Criminal Court in Tralee on five charges arising from a row with an adjoining farming family over access to a land-locked field near Listowel.
The dispute over access to “the field” goes back many decades, the court heard yesterday.
There were allegations during evidence of shots being fired, drains blocked maliciously, dead cows left on a right of way, gaps stopped with old machinery, bullying “dirty” taunts and a Garda file of years of complaints from both sides.
John Leahy (40), Meen, Listowel, denies threatening to kill three members of the Carmody family, and he also denies assault causing harm to Roger Carmody (37), on October 2nd, 2007, and to assaulting Jack Sullivan at Meen on the same date.
Mr Carmody told the court that Mr Leahy had struck him “right down on top of the head” with a hammer.
He had spent four days in hospital and had since suffered with depression, headaches and memory loss, and he was not sleeping well. The threatening to kill charges relate to Patrick Carmody snr, Patrick jnr and John Carmody on the same date and in the same place, prosecuting counsel Tom Rice said.
Roger Carmody, of Athea, Co Limerick, said he was on his family’s farm and walking along a right of way – established by a case in the Four Courts in the 1950s – to the field, owned by the Carmodys, when Mr Leahy, the neighbouring farmer, got off his tractor “right in the middle of the right of way” near a gap into the field.
“He turned and went back to the tractor, took a hammer off the tractor and came charging towards me. He jumped and struck me at the same time. He hit me with the hammer right on top of the head,” he added. Mr Carmody said he was dazed, knocked out and was “flat out in the field in a pool of blood – my head was stuck on to the grass with the blood”. An ambulance arrived and he spent four days in Kerry General Hospital.
Defence counsel John O’Sullivan put it to Roger Carmody that he had only received a minor injury and that medical evidence showed there was no neurological deficiency and no serious injury. Mr Carmody said he did not know what to say to that.
Asked by Mr O’Sullivan whether his father, Patrick Carmody snr, arrived on the scene with a four-pronged pike, Roger Carmody replied: “I don’t know. I was knocked out.”
The court heard from Mr O’Sullivan that “generations back”, Leahy lands and the Carmody lands were “all one”.
A division meant that Mr Leahy’s land was landlocked from the road and that the field in question was at the back of Mr Leahy’s farmyard.
Roger Carmody said he knew nothing about what defence counsel Mr O’Sullivan described as “a dirty comment” to Mr Leahy, a bachelor, that it was a pity he had “never bred”.
Mr O’Sullivan put it that his client was acting in self-defence, but Roger Carmody said: “Leahy attacked me that day because I was going into the field. He doesn’t want us into the field and that is what this is all about. He is trying to frighten us out of the field.”
Mr O’Sullivan also said the right of way had been abandoned over the years, but in August 2006 when Mr Leahy returned unexpectedly from the Galway races, the Carmodys were using a heavy machine to reopen it.
However, Roger Carmody said it was “not about the right of way” but about Mr Leahy trying to prevent the Carmodys from going into the field altogether.
“Every time we go into the field, he’s threatening us. He’ll bully us,” Mr Carmody said.
The case continues.