A 1995 Opel Corsa like the one the woman was asked to drive

A husband demanded that his unfaithful wife sell her €50,000 car and instead drive a 1995 Opel Corsa as part of his conditions for moving back into the family home.

At a provincial family law court, the mother told the court that her husband moved out after he found out that she was having an affair with a local married man.

The eight-week-long affair ended and the woman said that her husband made three demands so he could return to the family home: that she see a psychiatrist; that she give him €65,000 of her redundancy money; and that she sell her top-of-the-range car and drive a 1995 Opel Corsa instead.

“They were the three conditions that I had to agree to, but I didn’t agree to them. I did give him €20,000 in cash,” she said.

In court the woman laid bare the breakdown of her marriage during an unsuccessful Safety Order application against her former husband.

Tortured

“The pillar that my Safety Order application stands on is the fact that my kids are being affected and I am being emotionally and psychologically tortured. He is a man who can’t let go and accept that our marriage is over,” she said.

Recalling the night that her husband found out about the affair four years ago, the woman said her phone went off with a message from the man she was having the affair with and her husband picked it up.

“It is a time I am not proud of and it still eats me today. My husband ... pulled me out into the kitchen and he slapped me across the face,” she said.

“I would nearly give a man that because I saw his heart break in front of me,” she said.

She told the court that her husband called her parents at 3am “and then he put something up on Facebook to this fella’s Facebook account”.

Her husband moved out of the family home for the summer and made his demands about moving back in.

He later returned to live in the family home after receiving the €20,000 in cash. However, the woman said he would ask her questions over and over again about the affair. “He accused me of having six affairs with different men.”

The woman said that one year after the affair, she recommenced contact with the other man. She bought two mobile phones so they could keep in contact, but said there was nothing physical between them the second time around.

The solicitor for her husband told the court that the affair had ended the marriage of the other man and his wife.

After the husband learned that his wife had recommenced contact, he moved out of their home again.

The woman described a small number of subsequent flashpoints where her husband had threatened violence. In one incident when the woman arrived to pick up her children, her mother-in-law told her “you are not getting the girls back, you are only a drunk and a whore”.

The husband was also there and the gardai were called to defuse the situation.

In 2013, there was another incident where the man pinned his former wife up against a door. She suffered bruising and made a complaint to gardai. The man was charged with assault, but she was unable to attend the court date due to work commitments overseas and the case was struck out.

The man’s solicitor told the court that the accusation of assault was denied and would have been contested.

The woman said that her former husband was “a good father, but at times he doesn’t realise that he is affecting the children. I want my kids to have a chance of a normal life.”

The man didn’t give evidence in the case and the judge ruled that the threshold for a Safety Order had not been met and refused the application.

Herald