Audio sex tapes involving Patrick Quirke and Mary Lowry were found during a search of Quirke’s home, it can now be revealed.
Defence lawyers successfully applied to keep this and other evidence from the jury in one of a number of applications about the admissibility of evidence.
It can now be disclosed the jury did not hear about these recordings, along with other evidence, including computer searches about murderer Joe O’Reilly, missing woman Jo Jo Dullard and murder victim Siobhan Kearney.
The recordings, which were found on a USB stick, contained "very little dialogue", according to Ms Justice Eileen Creedon, who listened to them in private before making her decision on whether or not to allow the jury to hear them.
The audio recordings, which appear to have been made on a Nokia phone, contained sound recordings and were of "an intimate nature", the court was told. There were also recordings of Pat Quirke and his wife Imelda.
The judge ruled the jury should hear one recording of a conversation between Mary Lowry and her then boyfriend Flor Cantillon, but agreed with the defence that the sex tapes were more "prejudicial than probative" and might lead a jury to "attribute some strange sexual proclivity" to Patrick Quirke.
The material relating to Joe O’Reilly was an article from a blog post entitled 'How Joe O’Reilly thought he had committed the perfect murder'. Defence lawyers successfully argued that introducing this evidence was highly prejudicial, while not being of sufficient evidential value to allow it in to the trial.
They argued that it had "no probative value whatsoever" and merely established that an unknown person at an unknown time looked at an article about Joe O’Reilly. Joe O’Reilly had been in the news again that week and the jury could not have avoided sensational headlines about the killer, senior counsel Bernard Condon argued, explaining that to allow such evidence into the trial at that stage would be severely prejudicial.
He also argued against the jury hearing about items found on the computer connected to murder victim Siobhan Kearney and missing woman Jo Jo Dullard.
Another piece of evidence the prosecution was not allowed to introduce was a reconstruction of what gardaí believed was visible to Patrick Quirke on the day he removed the lid of the underground tank.
The gardaí believed their reconstruction, using a dummy, would show that Mr Quirke could not have seen what he claimed to have seen when he first removed the lid of the tank.
The defence had argued that the reconstruction was not carried out by an independent person and that the accused man was not afforded an opportunity to have a solicitor or engineer present.
The judge ruled that while the reconstruction was relevant and admissible, there were "frailties" in the evidence and therefore it should be ruled out of the trial.
