A group of retirees has been coming to the Central Criminal Court in Dublin to observe trials from the viewing galleries for about 10 years now, most recently watching former Kilkenny hurling great DJ Carey being jailed for 5½ years on fraud charges.
One of the group, Rosario Drennan Hennessy, has always been interested in crime, but it wasn’t until she retired that she began to attend courts.
“I was very busy with children and caregiving. That took up all my time,” she says.
The Cabra woman has been reading court reports in newspapers, listening to podcasts on crime and watching television reports for years but always wanted to experience the atmosphere inside the courtroom for herself.
“I was always dying to go to the courts. My husband used to say ‘go in, go in, go in’. Out of the blue one day, I did.”
In January 2023, Drennan Hennessy sat in on the much publicised so-called Hutch Trial, at which Gerard Hutch was acquitted of the murder of Kinahan gang member David Byrne at the Regency Hotel Dublin in 2016.
Over the course of that 52-day trial, she met retired pathology technician Noel Donohoe and former watchmaker Tony Nolan.
“You’d come in early; you’d sit waiting to get i
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