Man inspired by 1970s New York art caused more than €60,000 damage by spray painting trains
Sean Cullen (22) pleaded guilty to two counts of criminal damage and one of common assault of an Irish Rail employee.
Marc Thompson, prosecuting barrister, told Dublin Circuit Criminal Court that Irish Rail faced significant clean-up costs.
Mr Thompson said the prosecution is holding Cullen accountable for damage costing €60,914. Irish Rail has indicated there have been €40,000 further costs associated with these incidents.
READ MORE
Judge Martin Nolan on Wednesday remanded Cullen, also known as Cullen-Wilson, of Hope Avenue, East Wall, Dublin 3, in custody until Friday.
The judge said he will give his full decision on Friday, adding that Cullen 'deserves a salutary lesson'.
An investigating garda said gardaí were alerted to an incident at the Fairview Dart depot on September 25th, 2021.
An Irish Rail employee had noticed two men at the depot acting suspiciously and recognised they did not work there.
He approached them and grabbed Cullen. There was then a physical altercation during which Cullen pepper-sprayed the worker.
Cullen and his co-accused, who is not before the courts, fled the scene.
The Irish Rail employee was out of work for a period but has since recovered and returned to his role.
Several incidents involving criminal damage by graffiti to train carriages were outlined to the court, with photographs handed in. Others besides Cullen were also involved in some of these incidents, the court heard.
On February 21st, 2020, train carriages at the Docklands train station were sprayed with silver and black spray paint. Damage was also caused to the carriage's interiors with SD written using a marker.
Another incident took place at Connolly Station on November 22nd, 2021.
On June 6th, 2020, an equipment signal container at Merrion Gates, Merrion Road, was spray-painted.
Cullen was identified from CCTV and his home was searched in May 2022. During this search, spray cans and other items were found.
He was arrested and questioned about these incidents, but nothing of evidential value was obtained.
Cullen's fingerprints were identified on certain items by forensic analysis. He has one previous conviction for damaging property.
Karl Monaghan, defending barrister, put it to the investigating garda that the second man 'administered thumps' to the Irish Rail worker.
Seven references and an award Cullen received from a Garda initiative were handed to the court.
Cullen had €2,000 in court as a token of remorse. Mr Monaghan said this was an 'unfortunate series of offending' that has had serious consequences for Irish Rail.
He said Cullen became 'fascinated' by graffiti in the East Wall area and was aware of a 1970s art movement in New York, in which some street artists spray painted trains.
Counsel said his client knows his acts were criminal, wrong and he accepts full responsibility.
A letter of apology from Cullen said he is 'very regretful' for his actions and has not done graffiti since.
Cullen has a good work history and is an apprentice electrician, counsel said.
Mr Monaghan asked the court to consider ordering a probation report and to direct that his client be assessed for community service.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
15 minutes ago
- Irish Times
Bishop Eamonn Casey's remains removed from Galway cathedral
The remains of former Bishop of Galway Eamonn Casey have been removed from the crypt at the cathedral in Galway and returned to his family for reinterment. A brief statement from Galway diocese said that 'with the assent and co-operation of members of the late Bishop Eamonn's family and following prayers for the dead, his mortal remains have been moved from the Cathedral Crypt and entrusted to their care. It is their express wish that the arrangements they have made for Bishop Eamonn's final resting place remain private.' [ Obituary: Eamonn Casey - High-profile member of Catholic hierarchy caught in scandal over fathering of son Opens in new window ] It added that 'members of Bishop Eamonn's family involved ask that their earnest desire for privacy be respected at this time'. An RTÉ documentary in 2024, made in association with the Irish Mail on Sunday, examined the Catholic Church's handling of sexual abuse allegations against the former Bishop of Galway. It included an interview with one of the former bishop's accusers, his niece Patricia Donovan, who stated that her uncle first raped her when she was just five years old. She claimed that the sexual abuse continued for years. READ MORE Ms O'Donovan said that Bishop Casey had 'no fear of being caught'. In recent years it emerged that five people had complained of being sexually abused by Bishop Casey when they were children. Former CEO of the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church in Ireland, Ian Elliot, called the late Bishop Casey a 'sexual predator' in the RTÉ documentary. He said he found the account of what Ms Donovan experienced as 'entirely credible'. [ Analysis: Bishop Eamonn Casey was repeatedly given the benefit of doubt Opens in new window ] In its statement, the diocese of Galway recalled how following the documentary last July it had issued a statement noting that the continued resting of the mortal remains of Bishop Casey in the crypt of the Cathedral of Our Lady Assumed into Heaven and St Nicholas, Galway was a deeply felt matter that affected many people in different ways. It had appealed then 'for time and space' to allow for 'appropriate reflection and consultation'. In its statement today the diocese said it 'would like to thank everyone for their understanding of the situation, for their patience and for their respect as this process was undertaken and brought to a conclusion. Significant consensus emerged around the unique role of a Cathedral as a place of unity rather than division, healing rather than hurt and peace rather than disquiet.' He served as Bishop of Galway and Kilmacduagh from 1976 until 1992, when he stepped down after it emerged that he had fathered a child with an American woman, Annie Murphy , in 1974.
Irish Times
an hour ago
- Irish Times
Man (40s) arrested over €1.6m herbal cannabis seizure in Wexford
A man in his 40s has been arrested in connection with the seizure of €1.6 million worth of herbal cannabis in Wexford. In a targeted joint operation involving An Garda Síochána and Revenue 's Customs Service, a van containing approximately 80kg of herbal cannabis was intercepted in Ballycaraney, Co Wexford on Friday. The man is being detained under Section 2 of the Criminal Justice (Drug Trafficking) Act, 1996 at a Garda station in the east of the country. He may be held for a period of up to seven days. Pending analysis, the drugs that were seized hold an estimated street value of €1.6 million. They will be sent to Forensic Science Ireland for analysis, while investigations remain ongoing.
Irish Times
5 hours ago
- Irish Times
DJ Carey belongs to a strange and depressing category: a sporting legend turned conman
If you grew up in Kilkenny , as I did, during the county's long years of hurling supremacy , DJ Carey was about as celebrated as it was possible for a mortal man to be celebrated. I was not myself a particularly avid hurling fan, at least not by the standards of the city I grew up in; my big sporting heroes – Andre Agassi, Boris Becker – were more remote figures, and you were significantly less likely to see them having lunch in Langton's on a given Sunday. But the fact that you might see DJ Carey having lunch did not diminish the sense of his greatness, any more than the divinity of the Greek gods was diminished by their descending from Olympus for the occasional carvery lunch among mortals. It was, in a strange way, when I left Kilkenny to go to university in Dublin that I really got a sense of the strength of the association between the county and its hurling team; no sooner would I mention that I was from the place than I would be thrust into a conversation about hurling, and typically petitioned on whether the county's dominance was 'bad for the game'. It might have been bad for the game, but it was certainly good for Kilkenny. To be from Kilkenny was to be proud – automatically, almost congenitally proud – of its supremacy in the sport of hurling. And at the very centre of that was DJ: a true magician of the game, one of the greatest to ever do it. No more. It's hard to think of a sporting legend whose reputation has fallen so low. There are, it is true, your dopers – Lance Armstrong , for instance, or the entire country of Russia. But such people are more straightforward villains, merely cheats, or suspected cheats. And there are certainly those who have been accused of more serious crimes than Carey: your McGregors, your Tysons, your Oscar Pistoriuses. But Carey's post-hurling career puts him in a strange and depressing category: a sporting legend turned conman. READ MORE In works in fiction and in film, the archetype of the conman often appears as a kind of amoral anti-hero, whose schemes and swindles are characterised by a kind of disreputable grandeur. It is with good reason that we speak of con artists; the successful confidence man (or woman) is engaged in an act of hybrid narrative creation: part author, part actor, part thief. The hero of Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can is not Tom Hanks's dogged FBI agent Carl Hanratty, but rather Frank Abagnale jnr, the real-life con-artist played by the young Leonardo DiCaprio, whose ingenious swindles and daring escapes make the film so wildly entertaining. The most unsettling aspect of Patricia Highsmith 's Ripley novels is not the frequent brutal murders committed by her conman-protagonist Tom Ripley , but the queasy brilliance with which Highsmith forces the reader to admire the audacity and skill of his schemes, and even root for their success. But the reality is something different, sadder and more sordid. It's hard to imagine having even a perverse respect for a man who lied about having cancer in order to extract sympathy, and large amounts of cash, from wealthy victims. (This week, he pleaded guilty to 10 of 21 charges of defrauding people.) The image of Carey that will likely endure is not any of his countless inspired and exhilarating moments on the pitch, but the fake hospital selfie he sent to one of the moneyed marks he was attempting to fleece: lying in bed, looking thoroughly wretched, and with a smartphone charge cord up his nose, secured in place by a plaster. [ How DJ Carey went from superstar hurler to serial fraudster in spectacular downfall Opens in new window ] This, unbelievably, was one of the greatest Irish sportsmen of all time – not to mention one of the great Kilkennymen. There are wider questions to be asked about all this, of course. It's worth considering, in particular, why so many people were willing to give a renowned and beloved sportsman the benefit of the doubt, despite not knowing him well – a question that seems, at first, to contain its own answer, and then, when you think about it, suddenly not to. It's worth asking, too, about the extraordinary special treatment Carey received from AIB, who all but wrote off his debts of €9.5m . And there is surely a deeper story to be told here – psychological, personal – whose grim complexities will likely come to light over time. Thinking about DJ and his strange disgrace led me to YouTube, and to a compilation of his greatest moments as a player. There's a moment from a game in the early 1990s, when Carey scores an elegant point against Cork, and the camera lingers a moment on a group of young boys in the front row of the stand, bouncing and grinning at the thrill of what they're witnessing. Something drew me back: I replayed the clip and paused on the boys. With an uncanny jolt, I recognised one of them as the younger brother of a childhood friend, captured unaware in a moment of joy, his face glowing in the reflected light of an ephemeral magic. It was a beautiful thing, that magic, and it's strange and sad to think what became of it.
