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Two brothers who followed a 72-year-old woman home and pressured her to write out nearly € 25,000 in checks to buy them power tools, chainsaws and generators, have been jailed for two years each.
Thomas O’Driscoll (39), of Boherbuoi, Rathkeale, Co Limerick, and Patrick O’Driscoll (38), of Wolfburgess East, Rathkeale, pleaded guilty in Cork Circuit Criminal Court on one count of deception in Goleen, Co Cork in November 2018.
The court heard that the men traveled to West Cork on November 20, 2018 and spent the night. The next day, they struck up a conversation with a woman in her 70s at a jewelry store in Skibbereen.
Patrick O’Driscoll produced a machinery brochure and convinced the woman to give him her phone number. He told her that he would be in Goleen later that day. At 3.30 in the afternoon, the woman phoned Mr. O’Driscoll to say that it was not necessary to call. However, he told her that he was backing up his truck on his way.
The woman was perplexed because her home was difficult to find and was about 25 miles from Skibbereen.
They introduced him to a second man named “George” and he told them he didn’t need any machinery or tools.
The court heard that the couple began to “charm” the woman with a talk about Our Lady of Lourdes and then began to pressure her. George, who the Gardaí established was Thomas O’Driscoll, began filling a room in his house with machinery and tools while Patrick O’Driscoll continued the conversation.
Vulnerable
The court heard that the woman began to feel vulnerable when Patrick O’Driscoll became more aggressive and the men told her to write six checks, which she wrote for almost € 25,000 in total. They told him to rewrite the checks because they didn’t want them to cross.
The woman contacted AIB in Skibbereen on November 23, 2018 and was told that two checks worth 6,500 euros had been cashed. The other checks were canceled by the bank, who advised the woman to contact Gardaí.
She told Gardaí that she was “taken aback” and couldn’t believe what had happened. The men did not admit to anything when they were initially arrested in January last year.
In her statement on the impact of the victim, the woman said that she was very worried when the men arrived at her home, but that her instinct told her “not to show fear.”
She told the court she was going through “a lot of trauma” at the time and was not in “the right frame of mind” to deal with men. She added that she was “scared and embarrassed” by the incident.
The men each paid € 6,000 in compensation and their lawyers said they had € 4,000 withheld each in connection with the bail they wanted to give the woman.
‘Unprofessional’
Mahon Corkery, attorney for Thomas O’Driscoll, said the offense “was neither professional nor thoughtful” and that the guilty plea was important because the victim did not have to testify in court.
Ray Boland, Patrick O’Driscoll’s attorney, appealed for clemency since his client had never before been in circuit court.
Judge Seán Ó Donnabhain said it was a “tremendously serious crime” in which the brothers had followed “an elderly and vulnerable woman to a remote place”. He said men were “dominant” and did not give women “time to breathe let alone think.”
Describing their behavior as a “total invasion of a woman’s privacy,” he imprisoned the men for two years each.
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