A MAN who was a passenger in a car involved a feud-related drive-by gun attack on a home where children were present, has been jailed for ten years with the final two years suspended.
The sentence was imposed at Limerick Circuit Criminal Court, on Shane O’Donoghue (26), Lenihan Avenue, Prospect, Limerick, who also pleaded guilty to threatening to kill a man and to causing criminal damage.
O’Donoghue, and his accomplice, Kieran Fogarty, who drove the car involved in the gun attack, pleaded guilty to all of the charges.
Fogarty, who, four months later, went on to kill journalism student Joe Drennan in a hit and run, was previously jailed for eight years for the shooting, and had his sentence for killing Mr Drennan, by dangerous driving, increased by five years by the Court of Appeal last November, following an appeal brought by the Director of Public Prosecutions after pressure from the Drennan family.
Judge Colin Daly said that on June 4, 2023, O’Donoghue and an accomplice were traveling in an Opel Insignia car which pulled up outside a house at O’Malley Park, Southill, where some of the residents at the address were in the front garden.
O’Donoghue shouted at a woman, “who was holding an infant in her arms, that he would shoot her son”.
O’Donoghue and Fogarty then drove to a house “connected to the feud” and obtained a gun before traveling to Hyde Road, Ballincaurra Weston, where they “drove past the home of Jimmy Collins”, who is a relative of the woman who received the earlier threat.
Fogarty fired a number of shots towards the Collins family house where children gathered on what was “a sunny Sunday lunchtime”.
The judge said O’Donoghue had been wearing a mask but it “slipped” off his face, and he was easily identified by the occupants of the house.
“Gardai recovered three cartridge cases from the scene, which indicated that a semi-automatic gun was used,” said the judge.
O’Donoghue “exhibited an enormous degree of recklessness in carrying out this action with his co-accused”.
“There were adults and children present outside the house when the shots were fired,” added the judge.
“This and the earlier threats made, appears to be part of some wider intermittent feud.”
“Thankfully no casualties were caused during this incident. It appears that an individual may have been grazed by a bullet, which has only recently come to light.”
Sending out a warning to others involved in feuding or gun crime, that they would face custodial sentences, the judge said: “Society simply cannot countenance young men driving around this city discharging firearms into private residential houses on a Sunday afternoon or any afternoon or at any time.”
The judge said the maximum sentence he could have imposed was a “life” sentence. He said that sub section 4 of the statue Act set out “a mandatory minimum sentence of ten years”, and that he was satisfied that a headline sentence of 11 years was appropriate, “given the seriousness nature of the incident, the level of recklessness. The principle of deterrents must be a significant factor,” he added.
The judge said the “threat to kill” offence, also fell “into the high end of seriousness” and he was “satisfied to impose a headline sentence of eight years”.
He said the state acknowledged O’Donoghue’s early guilty plea was of “material assistance” and prevented the necessity of a trial.
O’Donoghue also pleaded guilty to to counts of causing criminal damage to a another at Hyde Rd on 21 August, 2023.
Criminal damage carries a maximum ten year prison sentence, however the judge said he was satisfied a headline sentence of five years on each charge was appropriate.
In respect of the gun attack in June 2023, the cort imposed a seven-year sentence; a five year sentence for the threat to kill charge to run concurrent to the gun charge.
Judge Daly imposed three-year sentences on each of the two criminal damage charges, to run concurrent to one another, and consecutive to the gun attack charge, “which gives as total sentence of ten years”. He suspended the final two years of the sentence for a period of ten years.
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