Thug given a tougher jail term... but only for a year as the news will ‘disappoint him’
‘She thought Daddy was going to die’ Taken to bedroom by gang member
A VICIOUS criminal with 20 previous convictions has had an ‘unduly lenient’ jail term increased.
However, it will only be for an extra year because a judge said the news would ‘be a source of grave disappointment’.
Donal O’Hara – who has a history of violence, including beating his pregnant girlfriend – was already on bail over a frightening gang attack on a young family when he helped terrorise a security guard and his wife.
Despite breaking his bail conditions in such an audacious manner, the criminal was jailed for just two years for that crime. However, Director of Public Prosecutions Claire Loftus was so outraged with the leniency of the sentence that she asked the Appeal Court judges to hand him a tougher sentence.
The saga began when the 27-year-old seasoned criminal took part in a seven-man burglary terrorising Emma Corcoran, her husband Mark and their three young children with a sawn-off shotgun. So terrified were the family in the raid, at their Tipperary home in November 2013, that their eight-year-old daughter told gardaí she thought ‘Daddy was going to die’. Emma Corcoran’s mother Kathleen said it was ‘heart-wrenching’ to realise some members of the gang had so many prior convictions.
O’Hara pleaded guilty for that crime and was jailed for five years. After he was charged he was let out on bail and joined another gang that terrorised a security guard and his wife in their Dublin home in 2015, using ‘violence and force and fear’.
The appeal court heard yesterday that the wife was still in her nightgown so a gang member brought her to her bedroom and ‘forced her to dress’. She was told to pack a bag and ‘that she and her family would be leaving their home that day’. The crime had a ‘very significant effect’ on their lives and they have been forced to ‘live in secret’, the court heard.
O’Hara was given a two-year jail term last July and told he should serve it after his five years in prison for the attack on the Corcoran family. Judge Tony Hunt decided he was merely ‘the brawn and not the brains’ behind it. He sentenced him to three years, with the final year suspended, at the Special Criminal Court, and told him to ‘get his act together’.
But, as the Irish Daily Mail exclusively revealed in January, DPP Ms Loftus sought a longer sentence, and yesterday the appeal court judges replaced it with a four-year term, in principle.
But Judge George Birmingham, president of the Court of Appeal, suspended the final 12 months, which means that O’Hara will only serve an extra year behind bars.
Judge Birmingham said the original two-year sentence was indeed too lenient, and that his court would have sentenced O’Hara more harshly had they been in Judge Hunt’s position in the court last July.
But he wanted to ‘afford appropriate respect’ to Judge Hunt’s original decision. He also wanted to ‘recognise the fact that having the sentence extended at this stage, when he is well into his sentence, must be a source of grave disappointment for Mr O’Hara’.
On that basis, the appeal court judges decided to ‘limit our intervention’ in the matter by suspending the final year of O’Hara’s new four-year sentence.
O’Hara, of Glin Park, Coolock, Dublin, has 20 previous convictions, including one for beating up his pregnant girlfriend in 2012. He was initially charged in November 2013 for his part in the raid on the Corcoran family home.
He was then refused bail at Clonmel District Court.
However, as revealed by the Mail, O’Hara later won a High Court appeal against that decision and was allowed out on bail in December 2013.
It was almost two years later, in October 2015, that he was finally jailed for that crime.
It was while on bail earlier that year – on June 9 – that O’Hara was part of the gang of seven who surrounded the Dublin security man, put him into the back of a car and later assaulted him.
The security guard, who worked for tycoon Jim Mansfield and his son, also Jim, was subjected to a frightening ordeal – along with his wife – at their home near Dublin’s CityWest.
O’Hara later admitted to false imprisonment of the couple, and the court heard that he was an ‘enthusiastic and substantial contributor’ to an assault on a neighbour who refused to open the gates to the complex.
O’Hara’s part in the attack was one of more than 300,000 crimes committed by criminals on bail over the past 15 years.