‘Innocent’ pair to pay GSOC costs
AN innocent couple who complained about a car accident with an off-duty garda have been landed with the €7,000 legal costs of the State’s failed attempt to prosecute them.
Maeve O’Brien was driving with her husband Fintan when her car was involved in a collision with a vehicle driven by Mark Kenny.
Following the 2011 incident, the couple, of Mullingar, Co. Westmeath, were accused of giving ‘false and misleading information’ to the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission. GSOC later ‘investigated if the civilians involved gave a false report’, the High Court heard last month. The case against them was thrown out in 2015 when Judge Kevin Kilraine at Sligo District Court decided that he was ‘unimpressed with the evidence’ offered by the State. The judge awarded costs of more than €7,000 against the Garda watchdog.
But GSOC last month asked the High Court to reverse the costs order. Eileen O’Leary SC, for the watchdog, argued it would be ‘contrary to public policy that an order for costs would be visited on GSOC,’ as GSOC should be able to ‘perform its functions without fear’.
Yesterday, Judge Miriam O’Regan quashed the district court’s decision to spare the couple any cost. As a result, it’s now expected that the O’Briens will have to pay the costs of the failed prosecution. This is despite the High Court judge yesterday describing the O’Briens as ‘innocent parties in all of this’.
Judge O’Regan told GSOC’s lawyers that she will want to hear a ‘decent argument’ if the watchdog wants to also oblige the O’Briens to pay the costs of this year’s High Court case. The judge told them: ‘In some respects the respondent [O’Briens] is the innocent party in all of this.’
Costs of the High Court hearings will be decided in the new year.
Outside court, the O’Briens themselves declined to comment, but their solicitor Caroline McLaughlin told the Irish Daily Mail: ‘They are considering the decision today and may make further applications to the court in the new year.’