By Mairead Carey

The trial of 21-year-old Wayne O’ Donoghue for the murder of his 11-year-old neighbour Robert Holohan near Midleton last January, is in its final stages.

The jury of seven women and five men have retired to consider their verdict in a case, which has shocked and saddened the country.

The jury will decide whether the engineering student murdered his young friend, or whether the killing was unintentional. The 21-year-old denies murder but admits manslaughter.

On Tuesday closing statements were made by both the prosecution and defence.

“You must put yourself in the shoes of Wayne O' Donoghue,” counsel for the prosecution Shane Murphy told the jury.

“Look at the situation at the time. What did Wayne O' Donoghue think he was doing? What was the natural, probable consequence of what he was doing?”

Defence senior counsel Blaise O’Carroll said the prosecution wanted the jury to have a dark interpretation of every event in the case.

“Any reasonable person looking at the pre-existing relationship and then the randomness of the meeting between Wayne and Robert that day, someone saying he intended to kill Robert, he intended to cause serious injuries, would strike you as completely absurd. It does not have the ring of truth about it,” he said.

Robert disappeared from his home in Ballyedmond on January 4 after going out to play on a bike. The bicycle was found at the roadside 500 meters from his home.

A massive search of the surrounding area was launched with thousands of people, Gardai, defence forces and civil defence involved. Eight days after his disappearance Robert’s body was found covered in black plastic hidden in undergrowth at the edge of Inch Strand, 12 miles from his home.

A postmortem carried out by State Pathologist Dr. Marie Cassidy showed that Robert died from asphyxiation.

The day after his funeral, Wayne O' Donoghue an engineering student who lived beside the Holohan family called the Gardai and confessed to killing the schoolboy.