Month: February 2023

Thirty years ago, on February 12, 1993, Frank McCarthy, aged 24, who lived with his parents in Lotamore, Mayfield. went missing. Soon after, Cathal O’Brien also disappeared, along with his friend, Kevin Ball from Wales.

Then a fourth man, Denis ‘Patch’ O’Driscoll, vanished in December, 1994. Gardaí discovered that three of the missing men had known each other at various times, and all had spent time in bedsits at a property in Wellington Terrace in Cork city.

The garda investigation led them to that property, which was later dubbed ‘the House of Horrors’, and attention focused on a local man, Fred Flannery, who had also lived in the property.

Back in the 1990s, Fred Flannery was well known to the gardaí and known to sleep rough in the woods around Mayfield and Glanmire.

By 1993 and 1994, the years of the disappearances, he was living in 9, Wellington Terrace, a house overlooking Kent Railway Station that had been converted into flats. Patrick ‘Patch’ O’Driscoll, a friend of his, also stayed there from time to time. He was a 32-year-old from Cork city and got his nickname from an eye patch he wore.

Some years earlier, he was a passenger in a stolen car driven by Fred Flannery. The car crashed and ‘Patch’ lost an eye. Late night parties in the property at Wellington Terrace were commonplace with alcohol, drugs and magic mushrooms allegedly consumed in large quantities. It was during one of these parties that events turned chaotic.

The story began in February, 1993, with the disappearance of Frank ‘Blackie’ McCarthy. He was 24 years old and had just been released from prison after serving a nine-month sentence. He met a friend that afternoon for a few drinks and they arranged to meet again later in the evening. Frank McCarthy left his home to meet his friend, but never showed up.

He disappeared without a trace, but the finger of suspicion was pointed at Fred Flannery. Shortly before going to prison, McCarthy had had a disagreement with him.

A few months later, in the summer of 1993, a young man from Kilmore in Co. Wexford came to live in Cork. Cathal O’Brien, a 23-year-old, had graduated from Waterford RTC and was doing some voluntary work with the Cork Simon Community in Lower John Street. He rented a flat in the same house as the Flannerys at 9, Wellington Terrace.

While working with Cork Simon, Cathal met Kevin Ball, a 42-year-old new age traveller from Wales. They became friendly and O’Brien invited him to move out of the shelter and share his flat in Wellington Terrace. Ball happily accepted the offer and moved in with him.

The following year, in April, 1994, the O’Brien family reported their son missing and it was then discovered that Ball had also disappeared.

Flannery claimed that Cathal O’Brien and Kevin Ball had gone travelling around England. At this stage, the case was being treated as a missing persons investigation and detailed descriptions were circulated to foreign police forces without success. Things changed in January, 1995, when Patch O’Driscoll was reported missing by his brother.

Patch had previously told him of strange events taking place in 9, Wellington Terrace, and because of that, he feared for his brother’s life. He told his story to the gardaí in MacCurtain Street garda station and that initiated a full-scale investigation.

We’ll never know exactly what happened in that house, but it was alleged there was a party in April, 1994 with Flannery, Patch O’Driscoll, Kevin Ball, Cathal O’Brien, and possibly one other.

At some point, Kevin Ball is said to have questioned how Patch could still be friendly with the man responsible for him losing his eye. Flannery got annoyed at this and left the flat. Ball was allegedly later beaten on the head with a hammer and died. Cathal O’Brien tried to stop this assault, but also lost his life.

The bodies of the two men were said to have been rolled in a carpet, removed from the house and buried at an unknown location.

In the Autumn of 1994, Patch O’Driscoll was very uneasy about the killings and having nightmares. in December of that year, he was also allegedly killed in Wellington Terrace. It was later testified in court that Flannery had admitted killing Mr O’Driscoll at the flat by hitting him with a hammer and  had cut up the body with a bowsaw and a Stanley knife.

No bodies were found, but Fred Flannery was charged with the murder of O’Driscoll. His trial in 1996 collapsed. Part of O’Driscoll’s body was later discovered in woodlands on the outskirts of Cork city, identified by a false eye and a sock with a diamond pattern as described at the trial by Michael Flannery.

No trace has ever been found of the other men. Flannery took his own life in 2002.

Children are messy creatures. When they’re young, you spend the day running around after them, putting toys away, cleaning up the various spillages and picking up their discarded clothes. It’s tiring but you don’t mind because they don’t know any better and you naively console yourself that it’s only short term. Life will get easier as they mature.

Those of you with grown up children know that is absolute nonsense. Teenagers get messier as they get older. They take untidiness to a new level. They can transform a tidy bedroom into a disaster area in minutes. They would rather tunnel under a mountain of dirty clothes to reach the bed than put them in the wash basket.

The bed can also double as a wardrobe, just leaving a little space among all the clutter to sleep in. That, apparently, is easier than tidying up and using the bed for its original purpose, and I have some more bad news for young parents. It doesn’t change when they hit their twenties and thirties either.

I can’t remember whether I was tidy kid or not, but I do know that I left home when I was twenty to make my own way in the world. Kids remain at home longer these because it’s harder to flee the nest while affordable properties are scarce, and mortgages are difficult to come by.

My wife and I own an adult child. He’s a grand young lad but he takes more looking after now than he did when he was six. He doesn’t seem to be in much of a hurry to leave either and why would he? He likes it here. He has a roof over his head, has his own tv room, and he’s fed and watered. His laundry is taken care of and his mother fusses over him as much as she did when he was a toddler, so, what’s not to like?

Lots of his buddies are in the same boat so our situation isn’t unique and from what I hear from other parents, the untidy young adult isn’t an unusual species either. The chaotic bedroom scene is standard with chaos and disarray is everywhere, but whose fault is it?

The blame lays with us for not training them but we didn’t know much better ourselves. We were reared by the traditional Irish mammy who did everything in the house and that’s been the way for generations.

I didn’t wash a cup, make a bed or use a hoover until I left home and entered the garda training centre in Templemore. One of the first lessons we got as recruits was in bed making. We sat in the large recreation hall which had a stage at one end. A bed was placed in the centre of the stage and one of the instructors gave a demonstration on how they expected us to make our beds every day for the duration of our stay. Bedrooms were inspected regularly and there would be consequences if beds were found undressed.

At the time, most of us thought this bed making lark was a bit over the top, but it soon became a daily routine, and it’s followed me through my life. It taught us discipline and making the bed first thing in the morning sets the tone for the rest of the day. They also taught us about keeping our personal space clean and tidy which was another new experience for me.

A relationship expert was quoted on the Internet as saying, “Many men were raised by parents who didn’t expect them to do much around the house, so this is very deeply engrained conditioning.” Women are often trained from a young age to look after themselves, and to measure cleanliness as a measure of self-worth so they become more uncomfortable when something isn’t clean and tidy, while their partner might not even notice.

When I was growing up, my mother never asked my father to do anything around the house. I remember getting ready for school in the morning and before my father left for work, his breakfast was put in front of him. When he came in from work in the middle of the day, his dinner was put on the table and when he finished in the evening, he had his tea. He didn’t boil as much as an egg.

It wasn’t that he didn’t know how or wasn’t interested, he just wasn’t allowed. He would probably have been charged with be trespassing if he went near the cooker, it wasn’t his place. The range was off limits to him as was the ironing board and the washing machine.

In the early years we were living with my grandparents, and my grandfather was always in the way. My grandmother was forever moving him around the kitchen while he sat listening to the wireless, a big beast of a thing that sat on a shelf in the corner of the kitchen. The wireless was the beast, not the grandfather.

My grandmother always seemed to be attached to the range, cooking and baking and my mother was her assistant. Together they kept the house intact. These days, most men are proficient in the use of an oven and a sweeping brush.

Phyllis Diller, the American actress had her own observations about housework. She said cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shovelling the driveway before it stops snowing. Joan Rivers wasn’t a fan of housework either. She said, “I hate housework! You make the beds, you do the dishes — and six months later you have to start all over again.”

According to Oscar Wilde, man is made for something better than disturbing dirt but I have no intention of suggesting that to my wife.

Some things in this world are difficult to explain. Take the Bermuda Triangle for example. Many planes and ships have gone missing in this area of the Atlantic Ocean. They were recorded as having entered the triangle but then disappeared without a trace. Bad weather, hurricanes and human error have all been blamed but the circumstances are still mysterious.

The presence of alien beings walking among us has intrigued many. While most of us dismiss the idea, many point the finger at Area 51 in the Nevada Desert, which is controlled by the U.S. Air Force. This property is surrounded by secrecy and conspiracy theorists are convinced that captured alien spacecraft are being examined there and evidence of UFO’s is being covered up.

In 1872, the Mary Celeste set sail from New York Harbour on its way to Italy. On board were the ship’s captain, Benjamin S. Briggs, his wife, Sarah, and their 2-year-old daughter, Sophia, along with eight crewmembers. Less than a month later, a passing British ship spotted the Mary Celeste at full sail and adrift with no sign of the captain, his family or any of the crew.

Aside from several feet of water in the hold and a missing lifeboat, the ship was undamaged and loaded with six months’ worth of food and water.

Closer to home, we all regularly experience incidents in our lives that cause us to wonder if other forces are at work, but we usually attribute these to coincidence. Like when you are thinking about someone, and they suddenly appear at your front door. Or just as you were about to call someone, that person suddenly rings you instead. Coincidence or not?

National Geographic reported that your odds of being killed by a meteor are 1 in 1,600,000. So, the odds would seem infinitesimally small that a meteor, which had been flying through space for more than four-and-a-half billion years without hitting a target, would hit the home of a family with the last name “Commette.” According to Time magazine, in a bizarre case of cosmic synchronicity, that is exactly what happened to one family in France.

Thankfully, no one was hurt, and the Commettes are now the proud owners of their own extremely rare extra-terrestrial rock.

The reason I’m banging on about this is because I have had my own experience of coincidence and I think it’s a bit freaky.

I transferred from Blarney Garda Station to Mayfield in 1990 and one of the first people I met there was John O’Connor. We were on the same unit, so we worked together every day and soon became friends. After a couple of years, I moved into the community policing section which was just being formed at the time and not too long afterwards, John joined me.

In the mid-nineties, we both developed an interest in what was happening in Belarus in the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and we ended up raising awareness and collecting humanitarian aid for distribution to schools, hospitals, orphanages and day care centres in that part of the world affected by the radiation fallout.

We decided to up the ante a few years later and in 1999 we arranged to drive a truck load of aid to Belarus. Neither of us had a truck licence, so we found a driving instructor and took lessons. We did our driving tests on the same day and both of us passed. We borrowed a truck and off we went.

I got promoted in 2000 and left Mayfield but a few years later, found myself back in community policing in Anglesea St. in the city centre. John got promoted shortly after me and went to Cyprus for a stint with the UN. When he returned to Cork, he took charge of community policing in the northside of the city, so we were back working together again.

John introduced me to Cyprus, and we became regular visitors and on one occasion we had planned to fly from Gatwick to Larnaca. John had booked his flight the day after me and when we were boarding the aircraft, I asked him what seat he was in, and he showed me his boarding card. It turned out we were sitting together even though we had both opted for random seating.

In 2013, I followed in John’s footsteps and did a stint in Cyprus with the UN and we both have many mutual friends there now.

I’ve had a dodgy back for a long time and when I was leaving Cyprus last November, I slipped on a wet floor in an elevator. I grabbed the handrail to prevent a fall, but I knew the jolt had affected my back. I was only home a day when it went into spasm. My GP called to the house and gave me an injection, but my left leg was numb, so he sent me for an MRI and suggested having it looked at by a consultant. I got an appointment to attend the Mater Hospital in Cork on 9^th January.

John had also been suffering with back trouble for a few years and he had been attending the same consultant in the Mater. They had tried a range of methods to solve his issue without success and he was also given an appointment on 9^th January, the same day as me, to examine further options.

His appointment was in the morning, and he rang me afterwards to tell me he was scheduled to go for surgery on 12^th January. I visited the same consultant in the afternoon on the same day and I left his office with an appointment for surgery on 30^th January.

Our lives are following a very similar path, so I really hope he lives a long and healthy life.