A witness in the trial of a woman and teenage girl accused of murdering Scarlett Faulkner has described seeing a female ‘bashing’ the deceased’s head as she lay by the side of the road.

The trial also heard yesterday from a witness who, after he had left the box, called the two accused ‘f*ing dirtbirds’.

Judge Kerida Naidoo told the jury anything they had seen or heard from the witness after he left the box ‘is not evidence and you are to ignore it completely’.

Ten witnesses gave evidence yesterday of what they witnessed as they drove up to the Birdhill roundabout just off the M7 between Limerick city and Nenagh in Co. Tipperary on the afternoon of Saturday, March 21 last. Ivan Kennedy told prosecution counsel Seoirse Ó Dúnlaing it was a ‘lovely, sunny spring day’ and he was driving in the area at about 5.20pm with his daughter in the passenger seat.

As he approached the roundabout, he saw a woman trying to open the door of a car which was attempting to do a U-turn.

The car accelerated but because the woman was gripping the handle, she fell forward on her face, he said. Another female carrying a weapon went up to the woman on the ground and, the witness said, started ‘raining down blows on her head numerous times – she was bashing the lady’s head in on the ground’.

Mr Kennedy said he thought the woman on the ground would die so he pulled onto the hard margin, intending to help.

However, his daughter begged him not to get out and told him there was a man using an axe nearby to bash a car that was stopped at the roundabout.

Mr Kennedy said he rolled down his window and shouted ‘stop’ at the top of his voice. The female with the weapon in her hand looked at him and stopped what she had been doing.

Mr Kennedy said he believed he had seen her deliver ten or 11 blows and with each strike, the head of the woman on the ground moved involuntarily.

In his opening speech earlier this week, Mr Ó Dúnlaing told the jury that the motive for the attack was that Ms Faulkner was in a relationship with the older accused’s ex-husband.

Another witness, Adam Coleman, was driving in Birdhill when he saw a woman running towards a man who was holding an axe over his head.

He said the man was not doing anything with the axe but ‘looked to be dragging out of the woman, pulling on her clothes, trying to pull her back towards him’.

About 50 metres further along, he saw ‘a girl lying on the road who looked to be getting attacked by another girl’. He described the attacker holding a long piece of wood or a stick above her head and ‘swinging at the head of the girl on the ground’. Witness Michael Tobin then told Mr Ó Dúnlaing that he was driving a bus for an under-14 football team when he came across two cars stopped on the road and a woman and a man with implements in their hands.

As he drove on, he saw a person lying by the side of the road. He stopped the bus and opened the door but when he saw the wounds to the woman’s head, he drove on because he didn’t want the children on the bus to see.

He pulled in about 20 metres further down, grabbed a fleece jacket and got off the bus. She was still breathing but the injuries to her head were ‘severe’, he said. He used the fleece to staunch the wound, cleared blood from her nose and mouth, and moved her into the recovery position. Sheila Ryan, a nurse, arrived and helped Mr Tobin.

She noticed the large head wound which was ‘bleeding profusely’ from what seemed to be ‘targeted’ strikes. She said the woman was breathing, but the witness was concerned that she would die while they waited for an ambulance. Witness Breda Floyd said she was a passenger in a car travelling to Thurles for a game between Kilkenny and Tipperary when, at Birdhill, she noticed a van and car that appeared to be ‘ramming each other’. The vehicles stopped and she saw a man at the passenger side of the van holding what looked like a sledgehammer.

He went to the car that had stopped and smashed the back window.

Ms Floyd said it was ‘terribly traumatic and frightening’ so the driver of the car she was in attempted to do a U-turn to get away. As he was turning, a woman ‘appeared from nowhere’ beside the car and grabbed the driver’s side wiper before moving to the front and then passenger side of the car. Ms Floyd said the woman looked ‘totally terrified’ and tried to grab the passenger wing mirror and kept trying to grab the car as the driver moved away.

Earlier yesterday, a witness told Mr Ó Dúnlaing that the deceased and her boyfriend had been in his apartment the previous night and that Saturday morning. He denied that Scarlett had been smoking crack but accepted that her boyfriend was ‘sniffing coke’.

The witness fell asleep and woke up to see the accused woman, the former wife of Scarlett’s new boyfriend, standing over him. He said the accused was ‘going on’ about her husband and was demanding, in a ‘very violent way’ to know where he was. After the witness left the witness box, he leaned over the two accused and called them ‘fking dirtbirds’.

The 17-year-old accused has denied murder but pleaded guilty to manslaughter.

Her 41-year-old co-accused has denied murdering Ms Faulkner, 28, who died on April 13.

The trial continues.