How did a 21-year-old man come to die on a driveway in the West of Ireland?
When Joe Deacy chose to reacquaint himself with Ireland, the country where his grandparents were born, he made a decision that led to the happiest years of his life and his eventual death. You can draw a five-year line, straight from his first visit to a local Irish club as a teenager in England, to the day he was found unconscious and bleeding from the face on a driveway in the County Mayo countryside aged 21.
Joe died on 13 August 2017. Every August since, his family and friends come to County Mayo, walk up to the gates of the house where he was found and peacefully demand answers for his death. To this day, no one has been found accountable.
I didn’t know Joe, but I knew of him. We both grew up in St Albans, Hertfordshire, and were in the same school year, though we went to different schools. Several of my friends played football with Joe; such was his passion for West Ham that he converted one of my classmates into a die-hard supporter.
A common refrain from people who knew Joe is that they can’t remember how they met: he just burst into their life. He organised trips to Cheltenham races, inviting friends from St Albans, classmates from his secondary school near Watford and his Gaelic football teammates. He was a social mixologist, shaking people together in new combinations.
Every so often Facebook reminds me that Joe and I are still ‘friends’. His profile is still there, the word ‘Remembering’ fixed above his name. Its pictures preserve him in joyous, laddish 2010s aspic: rocking a fedora, flanked by mates, pint in hand. He was blond and sharp-chinned, with a puckish grin.
Each August, a year’s worth of grief and commemoration for Joe’s death is compacted into a single weekend: a charity Gaelic football match in St Albans on Saturday; then a walk to the house in Mayo on Sunday. The game is the sunnier of the two events. People sip Magners and Club Orange by the pitch, chatting in English and Irish accents. Parents and kids share Tayto crisps; toddlers and dogs on harnesses – markers of an adulthood Joe never attained.
After the game, there is a barbecue and live music in the clubhouse. ‘Today is a fitting testament to what Joe was about,’ reads a homemade programme for the match. ‘To be surrounded by his family and friends in a sporting environment, and all while consuming copious amounts of alcohol, was his idea of heaven!’ The teams are St Colmcille’s, Joe’s old team, who train at the Irish Club, and The Hammers, Joe’s family and friends, named for the club he supported with his Wembley-born father, Adrian.
Adrian’s parents, Martin and Ann Deacy, met in London but were from Bohola and Swinford, towns five miles apart in County Mayo in the west of Ireland. That meant Joe spent several summers in Mayo as a young boy. Yet it was only when he was around 16, according to Adrian, that Joe started to play Gaelic football.
To English eyes, watching Gaelic football is an uncanny experience. The goals are football-sized but with H-shaped extensions for kicking the ball over, like rugby. The ball is round, but you can bounce it or drop-kick it or pass it with big looping throws. Players don’t wear shinpads; the tackles are more like grapples. This year, despite their amateur status and one mid-game broken arm, the Hammers win convincingly, 2–10 to 1–5.
By proudly embracing his Irish heritage as a teenager, Joe was both choosing to differentiate himself from his English friends and following a well-trodden path. Ed Sheeran, who has a pair of Irish grandparents, claims he is culturally Irish: he too cites childhood holidays in Ireland, as well as growing up with trad music in the house. Between 2017 and 2020, 358,900 Irish passports were issued to British residents: for some a pragmatic post-Brexit choice, but also an occasion for many to take their Irishness to heart.
St Albans Irish Club gave Joe a game and a social scene he loved – plus, his father recalls, the bar staff would pull him a pint without asking for his ID. Joe started going to Mayo six or seven times a year, staying with the extended Deacy clan. There are stories of Joe turning up unannounced at his relatives’ houses, filling up on chicken stew, staying the night then cadging a ride to the airport the next day. By all accounts, they were delighted to have him. He had applied for an Irish passport shortly before his death.
By the summer of 2016, Joe was 20 and at the height of his infatuation with Mayo and Gaelic football. One of his close friends managed a pub called the Railway Bar in Radlett, just south of St Albans, which became a regular hangout spot. It was in this bar that Joe met Conor Byrne, a Gaelic player for the Mayo under-21s team. Conor was in England on a six-month stay: Joe’s friend knew him and had offered him a room above the bar.
You can imagine Joe’s excitement to be spending time with a junior Mayo player. The pair had common ground: Conor’s family lived in a place called Gortnasillagh, ten minutes’ drive from Swinford where Joe had extended family. Joe would visit Conor’s house in Mayo more than once, but the first night he stayed over would be his last. At the time of his death in 2017, Joe was still living in St Albans with his dad. He had a traineeship as a consultant at PwC, commuting into London. That summer, Joe went to the west of Ireland to stay with family. He went to the Galway Races and had a ticket to support Mayo in the 2017 All-Ireland Gaelic semi-final in Dublin, but would never get the chance to see the match.
On Friday 11 August 2017, Joe took a bus to meet Conor and his friends in Kiltimagh, 15 minutes south of Swinford. The group spent the night in a pub, and at 1:30am Joe and Conor got a lift home to Conor’s family home in Gortnasillagh. They arrived at 1:50am, according to a Snapchat sent to Joe’s second cousins. At 3:55am, Joe sent another Snapchat to his cousins. He was still in the house and it seemed he had had a few drinks, but was not injured in any way.
At 6:45am, a cyclist spotted Joe lying unconscious on the front driveway of the house with head injuries and rang Conor’s father, whom he knew. Conor’s father rang 999 and the Garda, Ireland’s police. He and his son performed CPR on Joe for up to 25 minutes before paramedics arrived, but it was too late. The ambulance crew attempted resuscitation, removing Joe’s clothes in the process. Joe was airlifted to Beaumont Hospital in Dublin, but his life support was withdrawn the next day. That morning, the Byrnes dropped off Joe’s clothes and belongings with Joe’s father Adrian’s cousin, Gerry Moore, in Swinford. A story began to circulate that the Byrnes could be seen power-washing their driveway that same day. (The Byrnes did not respond to a request for comment for this article.)
Initially, Joe’s family were told by the Garda that Joe had fallen, perhaps off a step. It’s unclear why the police arrived at this theory; the driveway where he was found is completely flat. Still, you can understand why they were baffled by the setup: three people in a house in the middle of nowhere, plus someone unconscious on their driveway.
Early press reports incorrectly assumed Joe had been punched at a house party when really, as far as we know, just Joe, Conor and Conor’s parents were present. ‘My brothers went to see Joe in the hospital that night,’ Adrian told the Irish broadcaster RTE this August. ‘Straight away it was obvious to their eyes’: it was not a fall but ‘a savage attack, [an] atrocious beating’. It took two days for the Garda to upgrade the case to a murder investigation, after a postmortem found the cause of Joe’s death was blunt force trauma to the head.
That two-day delay was disastrous. Garda returned twice to search the house where Joe was found and interview members of the family living there, but no significant evidence was recovered.
In 2020, Ireland’s director of public prosecutions said there was insufficient evidence to bring charges against two men who had been arrested. More arrests were made last year, taking the total number of arrests to four – their identities were not publicised – but no charges have been brought. There have been no official findings about how the Garda handled the early stages of the investigation; a spokesperson says ‘this is a live, ongoing investigation’ and the police force ‘does not comment on investigative matters’.
For years, the Byrnes maintained near-total silence, although Conor’s father spoke to the Irish Independent once, denying any involvement in Joe’s death. Conor moved to Australia in 2023. But the police didn’t close the case.
Keeping the police investigation open maintains a flame of hope. Closing the case, by contrast, would bring a sad finality and a sense of justice denied. Yet it would trigger an inquest, which sets out to determine the cause of death. Every six months Joe’s name is mentioned in the coroner’s court, and each time the Garda ask for an extension to the case. Adrian doesn’t want the case to close yet: he can sense how painful an inquest will be.
Rural Ireland has a long history of unsolved murders which leave the Garda battling allegations of ineptitude and corruption. The most infamous is Sophie Plantier, a 39-year-old French woman who was killed in West Cork in 1996, the year of Joe’s birth. She had been badly beaten and died from multiple head injuries. Ian Bailey, an English journalist and self-confessed prime suspect, was arrested twice shortly after Plantier’s death but was never charged due to lack of evidence.
Until his death last year, Bailey claimed the Garda tried to frame him for the murder. A 2018 report by the Garda ombudsman found that the case was not properly managed and a number of statements and pieces of evidence had gone missing, including a blood-spattered gate from near where Plantier’s body was found and Bailey’s black coat. However, it found no evidence to support Bailey’s claims of corruption. In the murder of both Plantier and Deacy, there is a sense of the unique challenges of rural policing and how a cold case can be compounded by the silence of small communities – particularly in the case of a foreign victim.
When I contact the Garda for this article, their press office responds in an impressively prompt 15 minutes, although in their haste they unfortunately spell Joe’s surname wrong. ‘An investigation into the murder of Joe Decay [sic] is live and ongoing,’ at Claremorris Garda Station, the spokesperson says. An extensive investigation has been conducted since 2017 but Garda still ‘require and urge the public to come forward with the last piece of the jigsaw that will progress the investigation and bring some closure to the Deacy family’.
Immediately after Joe’s death the Deacys felt as if the Mayo community closed ranks. After all, Joe was a foreigner, an Englishman. The tide began to turn in 2019, after Mayo County Council took down a small memorial to Joe that the Deacys had placed at the end of the Gortnasillagh road. After the Deacys objected, the memorial was replaced with a much larger, permanent banner. Now, residents of the street drive past the words ‘JUSTICE FOR JOE’ every day.
The row over Joe’s roadside memorial drew a local politician into the Deacys’ cause: Brendan Mulroy, a Mayo County councillor. Mulroy got to know the family when they came to a council meeting to protest the removal of the first memorial. He then took part in one of the annual walks to the house where Joe was found and began to voice his support for the family’s Justice for Joe campaign.
Shortly after, he began to receive harassment from people telling him to back off. ‘It came through third parties,’ he says, who told him to stay away from the case. Mulroy has since asked Ireland’s minister for justice Jim O’Callaghan to set up an independent inquiry into Joe’s death. ‘All I can do is support the family and keep it as high-profile as possible until such a time they get a prosecution,’ he says.
This summer, Conor’s parents were named in the press for the first time as Peter and Anne Byrne. Peter is a vet in Ireland’s Department of Agriculture and previously managed his sons’ under-14 Gaelic football team, Moy Davitts. He has been described to me as a stocky man in his mid-to-late 60s, around five foot eight, with fading red hair: a very normal man from the west of Ireland, in other words.
Peter and Anne waived their anonymity because they, too, had experienced harassment over Joe’s death. In July 2025, a friend of Joe’s, Brendan Rowland, was convicted in a Mayo court of harassing both Peter and Anne between 2018 and 2019. Rowland pleaded guilty to sending 14 anonymous Christmas cards to the Byrnes, each signed ‘Joe’. One read: ‘To the Byrne family I hope Santy brings you a conscience from Joe’. Another said ‘Merry Christmas, everyone knows the truth. I hope this Christmas brings you courage instead of cowardice, from Joe.’ The Byrnes also received a black rose on their 29th wedding anniversary with a card that read ‘29 years I did not get that long’.
The Byrnes gave victim impact statements, in which they said they were victims of a campaign of hatred following Joe’s death. They stressed they did all they could to help him when he was found unconscious outside their home. Peter described the memorial walk to his home as a ‘march’ organised by a group who are ‘uninvited and unwelcome’. He added: ‘We have no voice with the investigation still alive.’
It’s valuable to have the Byrnes’ testimony at last. The Byrnes did assist the ambulance drivers the following morning, even if they didn’t accompany Joe to hospital or attend his funeral. The picture of Peter that emerges from his testimony is a man besieged by tragic events and wild online rumours, doing everything he possibly can to protect his family. And it’s worth being absolutely clear that nothing and no one has been ruled out of Joe’s murder and it is quite possible someone else could have visited the Byrnes’ home that night.
Yet the way the Byrnes withdrew in the aftermath of Joe’s death wounded the Deacy family, and led to a complete breakdown in trust. What is the annual memorial walk to the Byrne house if not a cry for understanding from a grieving family who felt they were pushed away?
The Deacy family still has many questions, not least why the Byrnes commissioned a second private postmortem on Joe’s body. These private autopsies are more common in England, according to Adrian, but a relatively new practice in Ireland. The Deacys have never seen the results of the private postmortem and the Byrnes are under no obligation to share what they found.
West Ireland in August could not be more different to sunny, suburban St Albans. Its undulating hills, handsome new houses and low drystone walls sit under the sort of lowering grey sky you might expect in the Scottish Highlands. I fly from London to Knock Airport in Mayo for the memorial walk early on Sunday morning with the Deacy family. Adrian’s cousin Gerry picks us up and as soon as we leave the airport the road becomes a single track. Gerry stops to let a black cow cross the road.
Nowadays, Adrian tends to sit out the memorial walk in Mayo: understandably it’s all still a bit too much. His brother Paul, Joe’s uncle, heads the Justice for Joe campaign and leads the walk each year. ‘I’ve got fond memories of coming here as a child,’ Paul says of Mayo, recalling its excellent food and time spent with his parents in Bohola and Swinford. ‘Now I only come here for funerals.’
The walk to the house where Joe Deacy was found begins on the edge of a surprisingly busy main road, the N5. It is on a turning here where the permanent ‘Justice for Joe’ banner now stands. People assemble at the junction to the sound of cows lowing in the fields behind. Four or five Garda cars appear at the edge of the road to keep watch. Well over 50 people arrive in total, including Brendan Mulroy.
The house is about 500 metres up the road. As we walk, the Deacys recall how Conor disappeared from social media the morning after Joe’s death. ‘There was a picture of my daughter with this boy on Facebook, and that morning when we heard Joseph’s dead, he deleted my daughter on Facebook,’ says Sharon, Paul’s wife. The Deacys later tell me that Conor simply deleted his Facebook account that day, thereby severing contact with Joe’s friends. (I attempted to reach Conor by Twitter, where an account in his name still exists, but he did not respond to my request.)
We pass three of the Byrnes’ neighbours who have come out onto their drive to say hello. Tall conifers surround the Byrnes’ house, which Sharon says are new. CCTV cameras are mounted on the gate. ‘They’re building a wall,’ she suggests.
Paul addresses the house, reading a laminated letter he has written to Peter and Anne. ‘Joe was murdered here eight years ago. How did no one in your household, not even your dog, hear anything?’ he asks. He calls on the Byrnes to ‘stand up and break down the wall of silence your family has built’. The gathering recites the Lord’s Prayer followed by a round of Hail Marys. Paul rolls up the letter and slots it between the rungs of the gate. The Deacys then throw roses over the gate onto the driveway. ‘Let’s hope this is the last year we need to do it,’ says Paul as they are about to leave.
Just then a young woman steps forward and introduces herself to Paul. She looks nervous. Murmurs spread among the gathering as their conversation continues. Then Sharon gives her a hug. Paul raises his hand and turns to the rest of the attendees. ‘This young lady… received two of Joe’s organs in a transplant,’ he says. There are gasps and applause. The young woman suffered from diabetes all throughout her childhood and later received Joe’s pancreas and his two kidneys. After discovering her donor’s identity through a charity, she made the two-hours’ drive to Mayo from County Clare to thank the Deacys in person.
After the walk, we decompress in Gerry’s pub in Swinford. Everyone is exhausted. It feels like the end – it should be the end. Then Paul’s phone lights up: a WhatsApp from a friend. An attached picture shows the gates of the Byrne home with the driveway completely cleared of roses, just one hour since the Deacys laid them there. ‘The police cleared it,’ he reads. In that moment, Paul knows he will be back here again next year.
