Addiction counsellor turned getaway driver enjoys loved-up romance with convicted killer

Sunday World

14-07-2025

Deirdre Arnold (42) was jailed last week for two years for acting as a getaway driver for 'violent and abusive thug' McHugh after he murdered mum-of-two Lisa Thompson
These are the never-before-seen pictures that show HSE addiction counsellor turned getaway driver Deirdre Arnold enjoying a loved-up romance with convicted killer Brian McHugh.
Arnold (42) was jailed last week for two years for acting as a getaway driver for 'violent and abusive thug' McHugh after he murdered mum-of-two Lisa Thompson by stabbing her 11 times in the chest and wrapping a blind cord around her neck.
The images obtained by the Sunday World show McHugh and Arnold enjoying a boozy sushi meal at a popular Japanese restaurant, downing Moet Champagne, celebrating a birthday party and, ironically, given they are both now in prison, posing in a prison cell during a visit to Kilmainham Gaol.
Addict
A source with knowledge of the couple's destructive relationship said this week that although Arnold had made herself out to be a victim of McHugh's violence, the only real victims were Lisa Thompson and her two children.
Deirdre Arnold
'Deirdre Arnold made herself out to be a victim,' the source said, 'and maybe to some extent that's true.
'But she was a trained addiction counsellor, while Brian McHugh was a drug addict.
'And although she claimed she did what she did out of fear of him, she could have walked away and told the guards what he did at any time.
'There's no defending anything that Brian McHugh did – but Deirdre Arnold was not some kind of innocent abroad.'
In March this year, McHugh (40), with a former address at Cairn Court, Poppintree, Ballymun in Dublin, was jailed for life for murdering 52-year-old Ms Thompson.
In a separate trial last April, a jury agreed with the prosecution that Arnold was not an 'innocent abroad' and had 'decided at every turn' to assist her then-partner McHugh, whom she knew to have murdered mother-of-two Ms Thompson.
Floral tributes at the home of Lisa Thompson (below)
Lisa Thompson
The jury unanimously accepted the State's case that Arnold impeded McHugh's prosecution by driving him to Ms Thompson's home at Sandyhill Gardens in Ballymun on May 9, 2022, where she waited outside for 'well over an hour' before driving him away from the scene.
Arnold later checked McHugh into the Clayton Hotel near Dublin Airport in an effort to help him evade detection.
It was also the prosecution's case that the defendant allowed her silver Hyundai Tucson to be used to dispose of evidence taken from Ms Thompson's home.
In the only interview she had given regarding her role in the case, Arnold repeated her courtroom claims that she was living in fear of McHugh after he tried to kill her on a number of occasions and also threatened her children.
Clothes
She told the Sunday World she made 25 separate reports against McHugh to gardai in Ballymun, Raheny, Coolock and Finglas, over a three-year period, alleging serious assaults, threats and harassment at the killer's hands.
Arnold claimed that on the day she agreed to drop McHugh up to Sandyhill Gardens, he had told her that he wanted to collect a bag of clothes from his aunt's house which was next door to murdered Lisa's.
'His auntie lives next door and I collected him out of his auntie's house,' Arnold claimed. 'I didn't know what he'd done.'
Deirdre Arnold and Brian McHugh posing for photos like giddy teenagers
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She said she had only agreed to collect him because she was afraid if she didn't, he would come down to her home where her kids were.
'The guards asked me that, and I told them if they had kids they'd understand.
'And because of that, when he threatened my kids, there was no way for even a second that I didn't think he meant it. So I collected him. When the gardai came later to search my house, they said to me then that he'd killed her.
'And I was like: 'No! Because there was no blood on him. When he came near me there was no blood on him or anything.
'This stuff about us changing the car … it never happened. They never found blood or DNA evidence in my car.
'He came out, no blood on his hands, as normal as normal can be for him.
'All he came out with was bags, which he had told me he was going up to his auntie Joan's to collect … so why would I think anything different?
Solicitor
'When the guards came to my house and said it was murder, I actually laughed because it was so weird.
'I said it couldn't have been because he had no blood on him or anything.
'And I know he's an evil animal but it was so hard to accept because there was nothing. I said this to my solicitor, I don't know whether he committed that crime over the three days.
'I don't know whether the poor woman was lying dead for the three days and he was going in an out ransacking the house.
'But if that's the case, he came out after stabbing that woman 11 times and strangling her and he was able to walk out as if nothing was wrong and with no blood on him.'
Asked to explain why, if she hadn't known McHugh had committed a murder , she booked him into a hotel afterwards, she said: 'He [McHugh] was saying he was going back to mine.
'I told him 'you're not' and, at that stage, it was anything to keep him away from my kids. And it was him that said he'd go to the hotel then – I didn't mind as long as he wasn't going to be near my kids.'
Aggressive
Jailing Arnold last week, Mr Justice Patrick McGrath accepted that she was in a very abusive relationship with McHugh and there was no doubt he was particularly aggressive and violent to her on a number of occasions.
Arnold speaks to our reporter
'To some extent she was under his dominion and became a user of heroin, no doubt due to the appalling abuse he visited on her in the course of their relationship,' he said. The judge went on to say the court had heard that McHugh had allegedly broken Arnold's arm by holding it on the bottom of a stairway and stamping on it.
Mr Justice McGrath said McHugh had also made threats against Arnold's children and behaved in a 'monstrous fashion' towards her in their relationship.
The judge said Arnold also outlined in a letter that she didn't expect forgiveness but wanted the Thompson family to know she was truly sorry for their loss and would never forget the consequences of that day.
The judge continued that Arnold had not fully come to terms with her role in this matter.
Remorse
The judge said Arnold had provided 'a considerable degree of assistance' by her presence at Sandyhill Gardens, when she was the driver of the getaway car.
'Whilst not fully accepting the part she played in the matter she has expressed remorse and I accept that's genuine,' Judge McGrath added.
Having considered mitigation, the judge reduced the headline sentence of five years to three years with one year suspended.
Deirdre Arnold and convicted killer Brian McHugh cuddling
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