John Devane, a criminal lawyer in Limerick, was called to the local police station one chilly, drizzly night to defend a man who had been caught with an underage boy. Devane described peering through the cell window. “I know his name,” he wrote. “We’ve met in amateur dramatics circles over the years and, with this link, he’s confident I’m there to help him. But, unknown to him, we also met when I was a young boy.”
No doubt the man had asked for Devane because the maverick solicitor was known as the “go-to” lawyer for many of the city’s finest criminals, including members of the rival gangs during the murderous feuds that plagued the area in the early 2000s. At one stage the fighting was so severe that he offered to mediate between the factions.
Devane’s purpose in life was taking on “the establishment”. He criticised judges, gardai and fellow solicitors. He brought a claim against the army on behalf of about 450 soldiers suing for deafness, and told The Late Late Show on RTÉ television that he was planning to sue on behalf of 800 prisoners whose human rights had been breached by the practice of “slopping out” their cells.
He also had his own demons: he had to apologise to a judge in Shannon after calling him a “clown”, was censured by the Law Society of Ireland over his dealings with a former client, and in 2011 was accused of assaulting a fellow solicitor at Limerick district court after grabbing him by the neck and attempting to headbutt him — he was spared a criminal conviction by making a €1,000 donation to charity. As he told the Limerick Leader: “Some have nine lives, I must have had 99 lives.”
John Dominic Devane was born in Limerick in October 1962, the great-nephew of Thomas Ashe, who took part in the Easter Rising. He was six weeks old when his father, Michael, a mechanic and a distant relative of the actor Gregory Peck, died from a heart attack; ten months later his eldest brother, Declan, was killed after being knocked off his bike by a car. His mother, Agnes (née Wallace), who later worked as a registrar of births, marriages and deaths, was urged to place her surviving six children in care, but demurred. “My mother, like many women of her time, struggled and did her best, in her own way, to deal with the enormous challenges that faced her,” he wrote.
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In his graphic memoir, Nobody Heard Me Cry (2008), Devane told of having his childhood stolen by pimps who prostituted him around Limerick. “I was eight years old when it first began, and this incident marked the beginning of a chain of sexual abuse which, sadly, would continue unabated throughout the remainder of my childhood,” he wrote, while acknowledging that his was far from an isolated case. His only confidant was Bawneen, a white cat.
Young John was an altar boy at the Church of Our Lady Queen of Peace and was educated at St Munchin’s College, both in Limerick, but was expelled for threatening to burn down the school. He took a job answering calls at a taxi company, where one of drivers persuaded him to join the army, although that could not solve the alcoholism that blighted his life. He left after three years and worked as a security guard in Dublin before returning to Limerick as a barman, while moonlighting on Big L, a pirate radio station.
Eventually he resumed his education, studying law at University College Cork. Midway through his course he fell from his bike and suffered a brain haemorrhage. He was given half an hour to live, but noted recently: “A lot of half-hours have passed since then.” He qualified in 1994.
“Friends persuaded him not to take the law into his own hands
In 2000 he made a statement to the gardai about the abuse he had suffered as child, but a year later learnt that there would be no prosecution. “I was plunged into an ever deeper pit of depression,” he wrote, fearing that the decision was because of the clients he represented. Friends persuaded him not to take the law into his own hands.
He married Julieann Stanley, who worked at the Evening Echo newspaper in Limerick, in 2007. She survives him with their daughter, Jess, who is at school, and Jemma, a daughter from a previous relationship who is a student. That year he stood as an independent candidate for Limerick East in the general election, saying that he wanted to “get in and stir the shit”. When Bertie Ahern, the taoiseach, visited the city Devane called for him to fall on his sword, duly presenting him with a plastic one; he was quickly disarmed by a female garda.
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He had been in ill health for many years, but never lost any of his enthusiasm for taking on the system. Although local courts paid tribute to him after his death, he believed that he had never been accepted by the profession. “I don’t toe the line, I don’t join cliques and I don’t play golf,” he said. “I’m sorry, I just didn’t come from that side of the track. Forgive me if I have sinned, but can it be held against me for ever?”
John Devane, solicitor, was born on October 1, 1962. He died after contracting the superbug KPC on May 14, 2017, aged 54