It was a trial that gripped the nation.
The seedy details of the love triangle between Mary Lowry, Patrick Quirke and Bobby Ryan read, at times, like a bizarre soap opera in the unlikely setting of rural Tipperary.
Each day brought new revelations of secrets, seething jealousy and lies that seemed strangely at odds with the rather old-fashioned, unremarkable people involved.
Even stone-faced Patrick Quirke’s flat cap, which he wore every day to the trial, seemed to jar with the eye-opening nature of the evidence.
How could people this ordinary, this boring, this normal be the key players in what seemed like something out of Midsomer Murders?
The public’s appetite for the story was insatiable, which is why it appeared on the front pages of newspapers on practically every day of the trial.
But at the heart of this story was a man’s murder, his life cruelly and brutally snuffed out.
Bobby Ryan’s crime was to love the wrong woman, and because of that a family have been robbed of their father.
Money-obsessed Patrick Quirke murdered love rival to get hands on Mary Lowry’s €1million farm
Despite all the salacious details that have kept us hooked day after day, this trial was about getting justice for a dead man and the people who loved him.
Now Patrick Quirke is starting a life sentence in prison – and justice has been done.
