A JURY HAS convicted a young man of the murder of a 65-year-old “gentleman” who had taken both the defendant and his mother into his home after learning of their struggles with homelessness, rejecting his defence that he was entitled to a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity.  

A consultant psychiatrist had told the jury that the first time Brian Ibe (23) reported hearing voices in his head was over a year after he was remanded in custody, on the same day his awareness of the possibility of the special verdict was first documented.  

The jury of six men and six women at the Central Criminal Court deliberated for just under seven hours before delivering their unanimous verdict today.   

Ibe, of no fixed abode and formerly of Moore Park, Newbridge, Co Kildare, had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to the murder of Peter Kennedy between 28 April and 12 May, 2020, both dates inclusive, in Newbridge.    

He had also pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to assault causing harm to Garda Brendan O’Donnell at Newbridge Garda Station on or about 29 April, 2020. The jury found him guilty of both charges.  

The trial heard that Mr Kennedy took Ibe’s mother, Martha, into his home after learning she was living in her car. In 2019, Mr Kennedy invited Brian Ibe to join them, but neighbours soon became concerned about the older man’s welfare.  

Rita Swords said she had been friends with Mr Kennedy for over 30 years and described him as a “good guy” and a “lovely man”.

She suggested he get help for Brian and Martha Ibe through the proper channels but told him not to get directly involved. She thought Martha and Brian Ibe were “taking advantage of his good nature”.  

In the run-up to Christmas 2019, Ms Swords invited Mr Kennedy for tea and a chat. When he arrived, he was “dishevelled” and “unkempt”, where usually he would be “smart”.  

Ms Swords fed him because he was hungry. “He was just a broken man, he just wasn’t himself,” she said.  

While Mr Kennedy was sitting with her, she said Brian Ibe called his phone and demanded a meal from McDonalds. She said Mr Kennedy was “panicking” and “terrified” when this happened.  

“I said Peter you’ve got to get help, you’ve got to get him out because this chap was dangerous; he was afraid of him,” said Ms Swords.  

Linda Mannion told prosecution counsel David Humphries BL that she first met Mr Kennedy in 1990 when she moved to Newbridge and was looking for somewhere to live.

He would often drive her home to Athy to see her parents, and when she got her first car, he became a guarantor on the loan.  

“You felt very safe in Peter’s presence,” she said. She described Mr Kennedy as “kind” and “extremely intelligent” and added: “He was always concerned with helping you out, helping you to better yourself.”  

Ms Mannion said around December 2019, Mr Kennedy told her that Ibe would come into his bedroom and shout at him for money.  

“He would just burst into his room when Peter was in his bed asleep,” she said.

“He would be woken up by Brian shouting, demanding money off him and Peter would say ‘I can’t get it for you now, I’m sleeping but I’ll get it for you in the morning’ and Brian would demand that he get up right then and get him whatever was required,” said the witness.  

Damian Molyneaux recalled Mr Kennedy, whom he described as his best friend, telling him that Brian Ibe twice threatened to kill him, saying he would “slit his throat”.  

Chris Pender, a County Councillor in Newbridge, said he had helped to find emergency accommodation for Brian Ibe.

He said the catalyst for Mr Kennedy wanting the accused out of the house was one “especially aggressive incident” in which Mr Kennedy said he woke to find Brian Ibe “standing over him threatening to stab him”.  

Martha Ibe, in a statement written down by gardai and read to the jury, said she had known Peter Kennedy for years and described him as a “lovely man” and a “kind gentleman”. 

She said her son moved in with them in Moore Park but went to live at a Peter McVerry Trust hostel in Walkinstown, Dublin after Mr Kennedy phoned gardai and demanded he leave. 

On 28 April, 2020, she said she was watching a DVD in her bedroom when she heard glass smashing.

Mr Kennedy ran from another room, shouting, “Come quick, I think it’s Brian” and went to walk past Ms Ibe into the bedroom. She then saw her son walking up the stairs, holding a knife with a blade that was five or six inches long. 

She said her son “zoomed past me to get to Peter” and began “pushing the knife with a jabbing motion, at least six times, into Peter’s neck”.

She said Mr Kennedy cried, “Help me, Martha, ring the guards!” while she shouted at her son to stop. She ran downstairs and struggled to open the front door, fearing that her son was coming behind her.

Once outside, she ran to a neighbour’s house for help and phoned gardai. She didn’t see her son again.  

The defence did not dispute that Brian Ibe assaulted Mr Kennedy and that he died as a result.

However, the defence asked the jury to consider whether Ibe qualified for a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity or of manslaughter due to diminished responsibility as a result of a mental disorder.  

Dr Stephen Monks, a consultant psychiatrist, told defence counsel Daniel O’Connell BL that he diagnosed Ibe with schizophrenia and found that at the time of the assault, he was psychotic.  

He said Ibe’s psychotic state was a significant contributing factor to the assault and without the psychosis, it was unlikely the assault would have happened.  

Due to his delusions, including voices in his head telling him to kill Mr Kennedy, Dr Monks said it was possible that Ibe did not understand the nature and quality of his actions and, therefore, the court could consider that Ibe met the criteria for the special verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity.  

Dr Gaurav Malhan also diagnosed Ibe with schizophrenia and found that as a result of his psychosis, he was unable to refrain from assaulting Mr Kennedy. 

Dr Mary Davoren, a psychiatrist called by the prosecution, disagreed with the schizophrenia diagnosis.

In his teens, she said it was documented that Ibe had regularly threatened and assaulted staff members at the institution where he was housed and smoked cannabis daily despite numerous appeals and warnings from gardai.  

This was, she said, evidence of a childhood conduct disorder which progressed to a dissocial personality disorder as he developed into adulthood.  

The threats he made to Mr Kennedy were goal-directed and rational, she said, and not evidence of the development of schizophrenia. He demanded money because he wanted money, she said.  

Dr Davoren said that in interviews with her, Ibe described the offence. When he arrived at Newbridge, he said he banged on the front door of Mr Kennedy’s home but nobody answered so he went to the back of the house where he found a rock.

He used the rock to smash a window and climbed through, picking up a shard of glass as he went. He said he went upstairs and found Mr Kennedy on the landing beside Mr Ibe’s mother.  

At some point, he noticed that the knife he had taken from the hostel was missing, so he used the shard of glass, about 8 inches long, to stab Mr Kennedy three or four times.

Mr Kennedy fell to the floor, he said, so Ibe started kicking him on the ground before leaving.

He went to a nearby train station, took a train to Heuston Station and walked back to the hostel.  

When Ibe spoke to gardai 24 hours later, Dr Davoren noted that he did not report any hallucinations, gave coherent answers and did not display any disordered thinking.  

During those interviews, he lied to gardai, telling them he had not been to Newbridge the previous day, that he had only met Mr Kennedy once and that he had never lived with him.

He denied knowledge of the assault on Mr Kennedy and suggested that his mother could be lying when she told gardai that she saw him stabbing Mr Kennedy.  

Also, while in garda custody, he refused to give a DNA sample or to allow gardai to take his fingerprints, became aggressive and punched a garda.

Dr Davoren said this was “goal directed” behaviour rather than “irrational or bizarre behaviour”.

He didn’t want to give samples to gardai and became agitated and aggressive when told he would have to, the psychiatrist said.  

Dr Davoren said there was no psychiatric explanation for his lies to gardai or for inconsistent accounts he gave of his cannabis use in the days and weeks before the assault.

She also said there was no psychiatric explanation for his failure to tell her that he was put out of a residential home in his teenage years because of his bad behaviour.  

In the days and weeks following the alleged offence, Dr Davoren said medical staff at Cloverhill Prison noted no overt psychotic symptoms despite multiple reviews of Ibe by GPs, nursing staff, junior doctors and a consultant psychiatrist.  

The first time that he reported hearing voices, Dr Davoren said, was one year and 13 days after he was remanded to Cloverhill. 

This was, she said, the same day that it was first documented that Ibe was aware of the possibility of a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity.  

Dr Davoren described the signs of Ibe’s personality disorder, including a callous unconcern for the feelings of others, gross and persistent irresponsibility and disregard for social norms, low tolerance to frustration and low threshold for aggression and violence.

He displays an incapacity to experience guilt or to benefit from punishment and is also prone to blame others or rationalise his behaviour, she said.  

When Ibe’s defence counsel asked what goal Ibe had in taking a butter knife and travelling to Newbridge to attack Mr Kennedy, Dr Davoren replied that Ibe may have been annoyed about being asked to leave the deceased’s house the previous Christmas.  

She said Ibe had complained that he lost some of his social welfare money because he could no longer attend an educational course in Newbridge and that he felt “disgust” about the state of Mr Kennedy’s house.

Ibe had complained to Dr Davoren that there was dog faeces on the floor and that Mr Kennedy didn’t keep the place clean.  

Dr Davoren said disgust is a “strong emotion”, and Ibe’s “anger and resentment” provides an alternative explanation for the assault.  

In his closing speech, Paul Carroll SC, for the Director of Public Prosecutions, reminded the jury of Dr Davoren’s diagnosis that Ibe had a dissocial personality disorder, which is not a mental disorder that could qualify a person for the special verdict.    

Mr Carroll said Ibe had repeatedly threatened Mr Kennedy during the months when he lived in the deceased’s house and demanded money from him. 

These were “result-driven” threats and demands and were not irrational or related to delusions or hallucinations, Mr Carroll said.  

In his closing speech for the defence, Conor Devally SC said it would be easy to have sympathy for Mr Kennedy, who he said was “too kind for his own good”.

They may also sympathise with any of the witnesses who spoke of his kindness and generosity.  

“Regardless of the brutality on display,” Mr Devally said the jury might also have sympathy for Ibe, given evidence that he was at the time of the alleged offence, a 19-year-old boy suffering with a mental illness.    

In her charge to the jury, Ms Justice Melanie Greally said that given the plea entered by Ibe, he had accepted that he killed Mr Kennedy and that he assaulted Garda O’Donnell.

It was also not contested that serious injury or death were natural and probable consequences of the assault he carried out on the deceased, she said.  

Ms Justice Greally told the jury to apply a “healthy skepticism” to the expert evidence and to apply their critical faculties in coming to their verdicts.  

After the jury returned their verdict today, Ms Justice Greally thanked them for the exemplary way they had deliberated in the case and excused them from jury service for life.   

The matter was put back to 19 May next for sentencing, with Ibe remanded in custody. He now faces the mandatory sentence of life in prison.