A mum-of-two believes she suffered a heart attack from the stress of losing her life savings at the hands of a cowboy builder.
Mary Ring O’Flynn and her husband Colman have had to borrow more than €70,000 to try to repair the damage left behind by conman Simon Dominican Byrne on their property in Ranelagh, south Dublin.
After a two-month period Byrne left behind a leaking roof, live wires in the garden – which electrocuted a man.
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He also burst a gas main pipe at the front of the property among a litany of other issues.
Yesterday at Dublin Circuit Court, Byrne was sentenced for two counts of deception for inducing Mary to accept an insurance certificate as genuine and as a consequence caused a substantial loss to her and her husband in May 2019.
But the 40-year-old – who has never apologised to the couple – avoided jail and was instead handed a two-year suspended sentence.
Today Mary and Colman tell their story so that others don’t fall victim to Byrne, who continues to work as a building contractor.
In an exclusive interview, Mary told the Irish Mirror: “We just don’t want it to happen to anyone else. We don’t want people to go through what we went through.
“It’s our home and somewhere we should be able to live without the horrors we’ve had to endure. On so many occasions I’ve sat on the stairs, looked around me and cried.
“And I’m still crying. Our money’s gone and all we’re left with is a mess that will possibly cost even more to rectify.”
The couple had lived in the house since 2007 and although some work was done over the years it was in need of a major renovation. The two accountants worked for years to build a pot of money to get the job done.
Mary said: “This was our dream project. We had decided we’re going for it. We’d saved enough. This was it.”
The couple came across Byrne after he replied to their post on a building Facebook page in 2019 looking for someone to carry out their renovation.
He met them at a hotel in May of that year before coming to their home.
The project involved making a single storey at the back of the property into a double height ceiling, electrics and plumbing of the whole house including a complete rewiring.
It also needed a new roof, the replacing the piping out to the water mains and some paving in the garden.
Mary said: “He added on some extra stuff for us at the end, like he could clear the garden and a few small extras.
“But I suppose that was to reel us in. He had everything about him that you thought he knew what he was on about.”
After agreeing a price, Byrne was to take on overseeing an eight-week project and the couple and their two boys moved out.
But some days before the project, Mary emailed him to ask for his insurance policy, stressing that no-one would go onsite without having that proof. He sent them two false insurance documents, but they had no reason to doubt them.
Colman told us: “In hindsight, we should have called the insurance.
“But we had a piece of paper, and we didn’t not trust him. Like it was proper insurance. You’d know your own insurance documents and it looked right.”
It was some weeks into the project when alarm bells started ringing and issues began to stack up.
Mary said: “One of the days we arrived and the neighbour said, ‘god you were lucky’ and I said, ‘what’.
“He cut a gas pipe out the front when he was digging with a mini digger. The whole street could have gone up in flames. He never said a word.” He also dug a trench in their garden to take up clay pipes and replace them with PVC pipes, but never did.
Mary added: “He just filled it back in without replacing the pipes. Until we got an engineer out after he had left, we didn’t know.”
When the couple tried to claim on Byrne’s insurance they discovered he was uninsured.
Cruel Byrne also ordered €14,000 worth of goods on their account from the building supplier company but much of it was not even brought to their site, despite Mary telling them that everything Byrne ordered must go there.
The building supplier company later settled with the couple. Their dream project turned into a complete nightmare and it was left in such bad condition that they had to leave saucepans out to catch water from the leaking roof which later had to be redone.
One morning, one of their two young boys woke up covered in water from a roof leak.
Live wires were left lying around , including in the garden where the children were playing and later a man was electrocuted on it but thankfully he was not too badly injured.
The whole ordeal caused so much stress that Mary ended up in hospital on three occasions, including in September last year when she suffered a heart attack. Mary said: “Everything was going downhill. Our money was gone, we had nothing. It was always in the back of my mind.
“Every day you got up, you saw the impact of what he did. We saw the impact it had on our two boys.”
The couple have had to borrow more than €70,000 in a bank loan and from family to repair the work but more needs to be done including the rewiring of the home.
Byrne, of Swanbrook, Bray, Co Wicklow, had previously pleaded guilty to his offences.
But Mary feels that he got off lightly with his suspended sentence.
She said: “I knew we weren’t getting anything financially. But I just wanted to see him being brought out in handcuffs. Just going to prison would have given me some solace.”
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