The Court of Appeal dismissed Donal Billings’s appeal against his convictions, rejecting challenges to the evidence and to the arrangements for conducting his trial in Irish. The judgment dealt only with the conviction appeal, not his separate appeal against sentence.
Billings was convicted by the Special Criminal Court on 26 October 2016 on five counts: unlawful possession of an explosive substance and four counts of making false reports suggesting offences had been committed. He was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison on 15 December 2016.
The appeal concerned whether the trial court had infringed his rights as an Irish speaker and whether the evidence was sufficient to support the convictions. The Court of Appeal said proceedings before it were interpreted in both directions between Irish and English.
On the language issues, the appeal court rejected complaints that the Explosive Substances Act 1883 had not been translated into Irish and that an Irish-language transcript had not been provided during the trial. It said no official Irish translation of the Westminster Act was required in the circumstances. It also found Billings had no entitlement to a transcript during trial, in either language, and that there was no evidence he had been disadvantaged. The court said the arrangements made by the Special Criminal Court were reasonable.
The evidence challenge focused on the explosive device found on an Éireann bus travelling from Ballina to Dublin. The trial court had found that a device was placed on the bus during a stop in Longford, after a driver reported seeing a man approach the bus, put something aboard and walk away. The bus was later searched near Maynooth, where Gardaí found an improvised device in the luggage compartment.
The appeal court acknowledged that its access to the CCTV footage was limited and that it could not fully endorse the trial court’s assessment of it. It also noted the trial court had the advantage of hearing the Garda inspector who interpreted the footage. But the appeal court found there was sufficient evidence for the trial court to convict on the explosive count. It said the evidence connecting Billings to the false calls was not meaningfully challenged on appeal.
The court dismissed the appeal. It did not determine the separate challenge to the sentence.