The Tobins

This Friday, Timmy Tobin was given a 14 year sentence for a horrific sex attack last August after he pleaded guilty.  The last 5 years were suspended.

In the early hours of Friday, the 14th of August 2009, Tobin noticed a man bothering a young foreign woman who was locked out of her house. The woman had argued with her boyfriend earlier and headed off home but had no house keys with her. Tobin told the guy that he was a McCarthy and that he should back off or else.  Tobin then walked with the woman around Westfields off the Condell Road.  After attempting to kiss her, the woman kissed Tobin on the cheek. Tobin later said he felt "let down and insulted" when she brushed off his advances.

Tobin then began a horrific attack that lasted over an hour. He punched the woman in the head, knocking her into undergrowth.  The woman offered him her possessions but Tobin laughed, telling her if he gave her oral sex he would leave her be.  Tobin pleaded guilty to four counts of rape and anal rape.  During the ordeal, Tobin made the woman wash herself in a stream in an attempt to destroy any forensic evidence of the sex attack.  

At one stage, when startled by a passer-by, Tobin began choking the woman. After raping the woman several times, choking her, threatening to kill her with a rock and making her again wash herself to destroy evidence of rape, Tobin broke down crying, asking her forgiveness, saying he was drunk and didn't know what he was doing. Tobin later told Gardai he had 8 cans of beer and some anti-depressants during that day.

The then-27-year-old Tobin went home, confessed to his girlfriend, and turned himself into Gardai next morning, but not before burning his clothes and destroying his mobile phone.

The victim had already gone to the Guards with her boyfriend at this stage and also travelled to Cork for examination by the Sexual Assault Treatment Unit in the South Infirmary Victoria University Hospital (Limerick only has "a part-time, partial sexual assault treatment service...which sees about 40 people a year"). 

At his initial hearing at the Limerick District Court, Judge Tom O’Donnell granted bail on the Tobin's own bond of €500 and an independent surety of €5,000.

Tobin, from Hogan Avenue, Kileely, was sentenced to 14 years, with fives years of that suspended, on Friday in the Central Criminal Court by Justice Barry White, the same judge who presided over the recent Eamon Lillis trial.

Judge Barry White

Timmy Tobin has six previous convictions.  One of those is for an attack, in 2003, on an 86-year old disabled woman.  In the early hours of Tuesday, the 15th of July 2003, Timmy Tobin, then just 21 years old, and another man broke in through the back door of the pensioner's house and threatened the 86-year old with a hammer in her bedroom.  After telling her they would shoot her if she didn't give them money, they eventually left with some €515 in cash.  In January 2004, Judge Carroll Moran, sitting in Limerick Circuit Court, jailed Timmy Tobin for seven years for the break-in but suspended the final three years because of Tobin's guilty plea.  Tobin's guilty plea followed some pretty irrefutable evidence left at the scene.  Timmy Tobin cut himself on glass as he left the elederly woman's house that night, leaving blood stains behind. Later he called an ambulance, telling paramedics and the Guards that he had just been stabbed on Thomond Bridge. 

Timmy isn't the only Tobin on Hogan Avenue, Kileely, fond of aggravated burglary.  By coincidence, Joseph Tobin, also of Hogan Avenue, assaulted and robbed a retired priest in his home back in 2007.  On Tuesday, the 6th of November 2007, Joseph Tobin and James Power, of Smith O'Brien Avenue, Kileely, broke in to a house through a conservatory window in Farranshone where Father Edward Kirby, a 72 year old retired priest lived.  Joseph Tobin hit the priest on the side of the head with a mallet, while Father Kirby was also hit with a sweeping brush handle and spat on.  The two ransacked the house causing €300 in damage, stole €315 in cash and and some rings belonging to the priest.

Father Kirby had been chaplain at Florida State Prison, where, among others, the serial-killer, Ted Bundy was executed and where, the priest said, "nothing ever happened to me and I was never under threat as I moved among men who had murdered, raped and robbed."  The priest returned to Limerick City in 1998 to retire. Since the attack, Father Kirby has had difficulty walking.

At his appearance in Limerick Circuit Court, in April 2008, Joseph Tobin, then 20 years old, was also charged with stealing cigarettes from a petrol station in Thomondgate, pleaded guilty to all charges.  He was judged the ringleader in the assault on the priest, and was given a 3 year sentence by Judge Carroll Moran, while Power later received a 2 year suspended sentence.