Clady man battered his dad after he picked him up at airport

A CLADY man who left his father with multiple fractures after a ‘particularly nasty assault’ was this week handed jail sentences totalling nine months.

“What you did to your father went beyond any possible argument about self-defence,” District Judge Nigel Broderick told Jamie Foley.

The judge added that given the context of Foley being handed a suspended jail sentence the month beforehand, for assaulting a different victim, ‘you are clearly a violent man’.

Earlier, a prosecuting lawyer outlined to Antrim Magistrates Court, sitting in Ballymena on Tuesday, that it was on August 31 last year when the police got a report from the defendant that he had been assaulted by his father.

Police conducted inquiries and it transpired that Foley’s father had collected the ‘narky and aggressive’ defendant and his then girlfriend at Belfast International Airport to take them home.

On the way, however, the defendant’s behaviour was such that his father had to pull over because ‘it was interfering with his driving’ but when he did, Foley asked him, “Do you want to go?”

Both men got out and fought but during the altercation, Foley charged at his father and ‘threw him over his shoulder’, causing the victim to land on his neck and shoulder.

He was ‘screaming in pain’ as Foley and his then girlfriend loaded him into the back seat of the car and drove to Derry.

The victim went to hospital and was found to have sustained six fractured ribs, a broken nose, broken collar bone and a broken right hand.

Foley, from The Crescent in Clady, later entered a guilty plea to causing grievous bodily harm and, during an impassioned plea in mitigation, defence counsel Grant Powles highlighted how there were unresolved issues between Foley and his father after the defendant was ‘effectively abandoned as a child’.

“He is ashamed of the fact that he is before the court and concerned about his liberty,” said the barrister, submitting that “it’s self-defence to some degree, but it’s gone too far.”

Mr Powles said while the case merited a jail sentence but, urging the judge to take a different approach, he highlighted that Foley has been taking steps to try to deal with his own issues and that according to the pre-sentence report ‘there are positive features in his life’.

Describing it as a ‘particularly nasty assault’, however, Judge Broderick said although defence counsel ‘has left no stone unturned’ in his plea, ‘in my view such is the seriousness and the aggravating nature of the office, the custody threshold is crossed’.

Imposing seven months for the GBH and activating two months of the previously suspended sentence, the judge ordered them to be served consecutively.

He also imposed a three-year restraining order.

Following a defence application, however, Foley was freed on bail pending an appeal.