A MAN found guilty of the manslaughter of a young woman in the Wicklow mountains in 1971 is to attempt to have his conviction overturned.

Martin Conmey, from Porterstown Lane in Co Meath, will aim to convince the Court of Criminal Appeal that he was not responsible for the death of Una Lynskey, 19, who disappeared while walking home and was found two months later buried in a ditch in a remote part of Glendhu.

The murder, which split the community and pitted neighbours against each other, made national headlines. One week after Lynskey’s body was discovered, Martin Kerrigan was killed in a retaliation attack by members of her family.

Kerrigan, Conmey and another local man, Dick Donnelly, were suspected by gardai to have been involved in Lynskey’s murder. Following Kerrigan’s death, Conmey and Donnelly were convicted of manslaughter in 1972. Both men appealed, and Donnelly’s conviction was overturned. Conmey served three years in prison.

“I’m doing this to clear my name,” the 57-year-old father-of-one said last week. “For the past 40 years I’ve been accused of something I didn’t do. Every morning I wake up, it’s the first thing on my mind. When I go out, I still feel like people are looking at me. It has affected every day of my life.”

Conmey’s case has been in the court system for 10 years and was only recently listed on the Court of Criminal Appeal’s schedule.

Lynskey was abducted on Porterstown Lane just before 7pm on October 12, 1971. Numerous witnesses told gardai that at around 7pm they saw an unfamiliar car driven by a middle-aged man heading in the direction of her bus stop. Local people also reported that shortly after 7pm they heard a woman’s screams coming from the lane.

A witness, James Donnelly, came forward to gardai the day after Lynskey disappeared. Donnelly said that at around 7pm he saw a middle-aged man drive out of Porterstown Lane with a woman matching Lynskey’s description in the back seat.

While reports were flooding in about sightings of the unfamiliar middle-aged man, numerous witnesses also gave statements to the gardai saying they saw Kerrigan, Conmey and Dick Donnelly at the local shop at the same time it is believed Lynskey was abducted.

In the days after her disappearance, gardai sent out a memo to all stations asking them to be on the alert for the car, described as a “Ford Zodiac with the Reg No finishing with 00”.

Two weeks after Lynskey went missing , however, Conmey, Kerrigan and Donnelly were brought into Trim station for questioning. The men were held for 48 hours, during which time Conmey and Kerrigan signed statements confessing to having been with Lynskey at the time of her death. The statements did not clarify how she died, who had been responsible for her death, or where her body was hidden. Donnelly did not sign a statement.

All three later alleged they were emotionally and physically abused by the gardai in custody. This was denied by the investigating team.

Following the interrogation of the men, Kerrigan was abducted by Lynskey’s brothers and cousin and driven up to the Wicklow mountains. He was badly beaten, and some hours later his dead body was found in the same spot where Lynskey’s body had been discovered a week before.

The three men were found not guilty of murder, but guilty of manslaughter.

The man and the distressed girl in the unfamiliar Ford Zodiac were never found.

The Murder of Una Lynskey and Martin Kerrigan is a chapter in a new book by Sarah McInerney entitled Where No One Can Hear You Scream — Murder and Assault in the Wicklow Mountains.

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