A MAN who admitted following his former girlfriend on several occasions and driving past where she was living has been convicted of harassing the woman over a four-year period.
Séamus Quirke, Duntahane Road, Fermoy, Co Cork, was remanded on bail by Judge Patrick Moran at Cork Circuit Criminal Court yesterday for sentence on October 23rd following his conviction.
Quirke (44) had denied four counts of harassing Gráinne Barry in Cork, Tipperary and Limerick and a fifth charge of causing criminal damage to her car, between 2005 and 2008. The jury of nine men and two women acquitted Quirke of the criminal damage charge but unanimously found him guilty of the four harassment charges after 2¼ hours of deliberations on the sixth day of the trial.
Afterwards Ms Barry issued a statement through her solicitor, in which she thanked gardaí in Fermoy and Roxboro Road in Limerick and the jury for its attention.
During the trial, Ms Barry, a schoolteacher in Mitchelstown, had told how she had a five-year on-off relationship with Quirke, which had ended badly in 1996.
After encountering him at a filling station in Roscrea, Co Tipperary, in 2005 when he glared at her, she saw him driving past her door in Limerick in July 2005 in one of a number of such strange encounters with him.
Ms Barry said she was taken aback in 2006 when, a few months after buying a house in Glencullen on the Duntahane Road in Fermoy, she discovered that Quirke had also bought a house in the same estate.
“I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I’d worked and saved hard for the deposit. My house is in a row of four houses in a cul-de-sac and his is three houses down on the main thoroughfare. The back of his house gives a bird’s eye view of the front of my house.”
