by JUSTINE MCCARTHY
Irish Times journalist and author.
Margaret Thatcher described Alfred Thomas Denning as “probably the greatest English judge of modern times”. Like Oliver Cromwell and Winston Churchill, the man is less esteemed on this side of the Irish Sea. For it was he – the erstwhile Master of the Rolls in charge of England’s civil justice system – who said the Birmingham Six should be disallowed a legal challenge against their wrongful convictions because the idea of police committing perjury and using violence and threats to procure confessions was “such an appalling vista”.
Ireland has no reason to feel smug. As Denning was uttering those immortal words, Osgur Breatnach and Brian McNally were in Portlaoise Prison and Nicky Kelly was on the run in America for a crime they did not commit. Ireland’s own appalling vista was revealed when the Court of Criminal Appeal found their supposed confessions were not made voluntarily. The ruling was hailed as a turning point in the administration of Irish justice. You might think everything changed after that. That the system was forced to examine itself, check its cultural biases, reform itself, ensure nothing like it ever happened again. But, if you think that, I’m sorry to say, you’re wrong.
In the half century since then, there have been more miscarriages of justice.
Seven years after Breatnach, Kelly and McNally were hauled before the courts, Joseph Grogan and Joseph Meleady were jailed for five years for damaging a car and assaulting its owner. They became known as the Tallaght Two during their campaign to prove their innocence. It took 17 years, two trials, three hearings by the Court of Criminal Appeal, a Supreme Court appeal, a separate Supreme Court hearing and two perjury trials before the courts issued a certificate of miscarriage of justice.
One of the most notorious abuses of the justice system was inflicted on a young Kerry woman. Joanne Hayes was charged with murder after a baby’s body was found on a Kerry beach. A judge dismissed the charge but the Kerry Babies Tribunal that followed has gone down in history as Ireland’s Salem Witches trial. Gardai argued that the baby on the beach and a baby who died after being born to Joanne nearly 80 kilometres away were twin children of two different men. A review of DNA evidence subsequently confirmed she was not the mother of the baby on the beach. In 2020, the State apologised to Joanne and the Hayes family for how they were treated.
The wrong done to Peter Pringle literally nearly killed him. A fortnight before his scheduled execution, his death sentence was commuted to 40 years’ penal servitude. He had been found guilty of the murders of two gardai, John Francis Morley and Henry Gerard Byrne, in a shoot-out in Co Roscommon. Pringle protested his innocence from the outset but the High Court only overturned his conviction after he had spent 14 years and 10 months in prison. He died three years ago, shortly before the death of another of the State’s victims.
The Morris Tribunal exposed how Frank Shortt, owner of the Point Inn nightclub on the Inishowen Peninsula, was framed by gardai for drugs offences. He was sentenced to three years imprisonment. According to Adrian Hardiman, the judge who declared it a miscarriage of justice, Frank Shortt “was perjured into prison by gardai for the purpose of furthering their own careers”.
The tribunal also exposed the wrongful arrest of Frank McBrearty Junior and members of his family for a murder that never even happened. Richie Barron died in a road accident but the tribunal discovered gardai framed McBrearty for his murder and conducted a campaign of intimidation against his family. In 2005, the government apologised and awarded him compensation.
Nora Wall became the first woman convicted of rape in Ireland when the former Mercy nun was found guilty in 1999. She was given a life sentence but was released on bail after four days when a witness admitted fabricating her testimony about seeing the nun holding down the alleged victim during the attack. The Court of Criminal Appeal declared it a miscarriage of justice in 2016 and awarded her compensation.
There are other cases, but these alone suffice to raise two fundamental questions.
One – would these miscarriages of justice have happened if the wrongful prosecution of Osgur Breatnach, Nicky Kelly and Brian McNally had been fully investigated by a State inquiry?
And two – if that had happened, would the real culprits have kept on getting away with their crimes?
Photos by Myles Dunne
Editor’s Note: The infamous Appalling Vista judgement by Lord Denning was used against the Sallins Men by the Irish Government.
