An octogenarian who’s travelled from Athlone to see Mary Lowry says: She’s some woman, isn’t she!
IT’S just after 9pm at Nellies Bar in Bansha when the door swings open and the village’s most famous resident walks in.
For the tiniest of moments, a hush falls on the crowded pub and then someone shouts out: ‘Mary, come in, how are you?’
Mary Lowry beams and, accompanied by her new boyfriend, goes to the bar to order a drink.
Dressed up for the evening, she looks a million times better than the snatched pictures of her running in and out of Dublin’s Central Criminal Court.
The locals continue to greet her and she smiles back warmly.
Moments earlier, a football team from out of town, who’d stopped off on the way back from a game, were asking after her.
‘Isn’t this where Mary Lowry lives?’ one of them, a little the worse for wear, had shouted at the bar staff. ‘Tell me, do all the women have tanks in this town?’
Some of the locals had laughed but once Mary arrives in the bar, it’s clear where their loyalties lie.
She is one of them and this small woodpanelled Tipperary bar, with its real fire and framed photographs of local farmers and football teams down the years, is a refuge for her.
After her initial grilling for four days in the witness box at the Pat Quirke murder trial, this is where she returned to in the evenings.
‘She’d come in and have her couple of drinks and that was her way of being normal,’ said a friend from the village.
‘One day she came in and someone had left the paper on the counter and it was open at the pages about the trial and of course there were the pictures of her,’ she remembers.
‘Well, she just got the paper, closed it and put it behind the bar, never saying anything. Everybody respected that.’
To the rest of the country, she had become notorious as the woman whose ex-lover was so obsessed with her that he killed her new boyfriend.
In the witness box, she endured three days of cross-examination by Quirke’s defence counsel, Bernard Condon.
Such was the grilling that he gave her, that one point she felt forced to exclaim. ‘I’m not on trial. Mr Quirke is on trial. Mary Lowry is not on trial.’
Crowds came to the courtroom just to see her.
There was disappointment when they found out that she didn’t attend every day of the trial, just the days when she or her sons were giving evidence.
One octogenarian had to be asked to leave the courtroom when he complained loudly that he couldn’t hear the proceedings. Outside, he explained that he’d travelled up from Athlone earlier that morning just to see Mary Lowry.
‘She’s some woman, isn’t she!’ he exclaimed. ‘She’s more famous now than Elvis Presley.’
Other diehards hardly missed a day of the trial. One of them speculated on Mary’s performance in the witness box.
‘God, she was mighty. She got emotional but she never wavered. She never wavered.’
Hundreds more came from all over the country.
Many got an early morning train to Heuston Station, made their way to the big Dublin department stores for some shopping and then queued up for an 11am start in the courtroom. One elderly woman, carrying a fold-up chair, explained the fascination. ‘The men love her. But you just wouldn’t know what to make of her,’ she said.
But in Bansha, a small picturesque village in the Golden Vale, just outside Tipperary town, there is no mystery about Mary Lowry, just sympathy for the tragedy she has endured in recent years.
Originally from Newport in north Tipperary, she has made the Fawnagown/Bansha area her home for the past 24 years.
Growing up, she was the third child of a farmer with a smallholding of 15 acres. She was especially close to her elder brother Eddie and that special relationship endures today.
After school, she got a job doing reception duties and accounts with a meat company in Limerick and spent 14 years there.
It was in 1987 at a disco in the Golden Thatch pub in Emly, Tipperary, that she first met her future husband, Martin Lowry.
They became and stayed best friends. After three or four years together, they decided they would get engaged and she started to put money away in the credit union.
There was no big romantic gesture with the engagement, it was just a natural progression, she said in court. When they got married in 1995, the family farm at Fawnagowan had not yet been signed over to her husband and financially they didn’t have much.
She worked full-time until their three children were born. Afterwards, ‘the children were my job and Martin ran the farm’, she said.
But in 2006 their lives were shattered when what began as a pain in Martin’s knee turned out to be something more sinister.
He was diagnosed with cancer. Within 18 months, he’d died at
‘Having her drinks was her way of being normal’ She described the affair as ‘sordid and seedy’
home, with Mary and the whole family present.
She was ‘utterly broken’, according to another friend.
‘I don’t think she even believed it for months afterwards that he was gone.’
‘She was shell-shocked, she was vulnerable. She’s still vulnerable.’
When Martin died, her children were aged just 10, eight and three-and-a-half.
During the trial she tried to put in words how she felt: ‘It was a very difficult time for me and for the boys but I tried to be the best mother possible. I always put them first.’
After her affair with Quirke, which she described as ‘sordid and seedy’, she met Bobby Ryan, aka Mr Moonlight.
At 52, he was 10 years older than her, but according to his brother, he had the mind and spirit of a teenager.
He loved life and he loved dancing and so did Mary.
She felt her luck had changed at last, she said.
But on June 3, 2011 he left her bed for the last time and was never seen again, murdered by Quirke.
When his murderer staged the discovery of Mr Moonlight’s body nearly two years later, on April 30, 2013, Lowry left her house at Fawnagown and has never returned.
She has since built her own two-storey house just outside Bansha. ‘I hope she finds peace now because she is a beautiful woman,’ said her friend from the village. ‘She is beautiful in every way.’