By Anthony O. Miller
“THE IRISH girl” was sent to prison this week after being busted on Monday night by six Cyprus police officers, Michael Robb, owner of the Blue Horizon pub in Limassol, said yesterday.
On Tuesday, Pauline O’Neill, 34, was convicted in Limassol District Court of working without a permit, and staying on an expired visa. She was given two three-month prison sentences, which will run concurrently. On Wednesday she started serving her time in Nicosia Central Prison.
From arrest to prison, O’Neill never had a lawyer, according to Robb and to both court and prison records. Robb said he had tried to get her a lawyer, but the police kept misdirecting him whenever he tried to learn her whereabouts, he claimed.
O’Neill waited tables in the Blue Horizon and did a little cleaning after the pub closed, Robb said. “She was very good with customers, very nice.” And “she was respectable,” not a fast-lane fixture of the Limassol cabaret scene. “The only thing she lived for was her cats,” he said.
Indeed, O’Neill was “a passionate animal-lover,” said Kyriacos Kyriacou, a friend and Green Party member. He said her life centred on her 10 cats and a dog. She was working so she could afford the food for them, he said.
“She made nothing, £8 to £10 a day, enough to pay the rent and feed the cats and dog,” added Robb, who like Kyriacou, was incensed at how O’Neill was treated by the police. “It took six people to arrest her?” Robb asked.
“I went to see her in jail,” Kyriacou said. “She was crying. She was in a cell with more than 20 women. It was all open, no door on the toilet.”
O’Neill came to Cyprus five-odd years ago, “fell in love, and stayed. Whether he left her, or she left him, I never knew,” Robb said. A woman friend said she thought O’Neill had patched over the pain of the broken romance by collecting her cats.
Now in prison, with no lawyer or outside contact, “the poor girl thinks that we’ve left her alone,” Robb said. “They wouldn’t let me talk to her,” when he phoned the prison, he said.
It was the same for Nicosia lawyer Phillip Yioupas, who volunteered to look into O’Neill’s case yesterday, and tried to contact her last night in the prison.
Yioupas, too, was offended that O’Neill appeared to have been railroaded into prison without having had a lawyer defend her at her trial. “It’s against a lot of things,” he said.
“Yes, she was illegal,” Robb said, “but they don’t treat criminals this way. It’s not as if she killed somebody.”
Robb said he was paying some teenage girls to look after O’Neill’s flat and feed her dog and cats each day.
He said he tried to interest Irish Consul Steffi Stephanou in O’Neill’s plight, but “he was not really interested in it. He kept putting me off.”
Robb said he was willing to pay for a lawyer for O’Neill, and “I’ll pay for the flight” back home to Ireland for her, he added, if somehow she can be released from prison and simply deported. “But they won’t let me talk to her,” he said.
