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Reporter competition thirty-seven entrant

Maksym Sharii: stole from his deceased neighbour

Peter Robinson lay dead in his Drumshanbo home. His neighbour Maksym Sharii repeatedly entered the house, took cherished guitars, groceries, alcohol and a bank card, then used the card to take money from the 77-year-old’s account. The adjudicated loss was €6,126.

Published 31 July 2026 · Remigration Ireland case ledger
20Charges before court
€6,126Property and money taken
5Guilty pleas
2½ yearsEffective custody

The dead man’s home became a target

Between 1 October and 16 November 2024, Sharii repeatedly entered the Aughakilbrack, Drumshanbo home of his neighbour Peter Robinson. Robinson was 77 and had died inside the house. Court reporting says Sharii burgled the property while Robinson’s body remained there and continued stealing in the period around the discovery of his death.

The stolen property included groceries, alcohol and guitars that Robinson prized. Some of the instruments were advertised for sale online. Sharii also took Robinson’s debit card and used it to remove pension and other money from his bank account.

The combined value of the property and money taken was €6,126. That is the recorded loss placed before the court, not an estimate created for this file.

Five guilty pleas, 15 charges taken into consideration

Sharii appeared before Donegal Circuit Criminal Court on 20 charges arising from the sequence. He pleaded guilty to three counts of burglary and two counts of theft. The remaining 15 charges were taken into consideration for sentencing.

This distinction matters. The final convictions were the five offences admitted by plea; this file does not present every charge on the indictment as a separate conviction.

The court heard that Sharii initially gave false accounts before cooperating with the investigation. His later guilty pleas and cooperation counted in mitigation, but the sentencing material also recorded continuing concerns about dishonesty, including in his dealings with the Probation Service.

“Gross and callous disrespect”

Judge John Aylmer placed the offending in the middle range of seriousness. He described it as showing “gross and callous disrespect” for Robinson, his family and his property. Another court report described the conduct as “depraved” and “callous”.

The court selected a headline sentence of four-and-a-half years for the burglaries and three years for the thefts, to run concurrently. After mitigation, those terms were reduced to three years and four months for burglary and two years and three months for theft. The final ten months of the longer term were suspended.

The result was an effective custodial term of two years and six months, including time already spent in custody.

Mitigation and previous-record limit

The defence said Sharii had a gambling addiction. The court also considered his early guilty pleas, eventual cooperation, engagement with rehabilitation and evidence that he was beginning to develop empathy for the harm done. He was described as a qualified physiotherapist.

The reports reviewed for this file do not clearly state whether he had previous convictions. It would therefore be unsafe to describe him either as a first offender or as someone with an earlier criminal record. The published record located establishes the five convictions in this case and no more.

Nationality and protection history: what is documented

Sentencing reports identify Sharii as originally from Ukraine. Two Irish Times reports published before the offences identified him as being from Odesa and as one of the Ukrainians living in Co Leitrim under the temporary-protection arrangements then being discussed.

In May 2024, Sharii said he had lived for five months in the Lough Allen Hotel. He said his home had been destroyed and members of his family were living in different European countries. A June 2024 follow-up described him as sharing a small house a short drive from Drumshanbo and working as a physiotherapist in Carrick-on-Shannon.

Those reports document his circumstances at that time. They do not establish an exact date of arrival, his immigration permission when sentenced in March 2026, whether that permission later changed, or any removal decision. This file makes no claim on those unanswered points.

Chronology

Public-cost benchmark

Applying the Irish Prison Service’s 2024 average annual cost of an available, staffed prison space, €99,072, to two-and-a-half nominal custodial years produces a capacity benchmark of approximately €247,680.

This is a nominal IPS staffed-space benchmark, not a personal invoice for Sharii. It applies one published system-wide annual rate to the effective sentence. Actual expenditure depends on time served, remission, prior custody, prison allocation, occupancy and rates in each relevant year.

The benchmark excludes the adjudicated €6,126 taken from Robinson, as well as Garda investigation, property recovery, prosecution, court, legal-aid, interpretation and probation costs. No case-specific totals for those services were published. Although reporting documents Sharii’s accommodation history before the offences, no defensible individual public-accommodation cost was located and none is assigned here.

Sources

Record checked: 31 July 2026. No published appeal outcome, present immigration-status decision or removal decision was located.