The Court of Appeal has dismissed Robert Nolan’s appeal against his conviction for membership of the IRA, finding the Special Criminal Court was entitled to draw an inference from his failure to answer material questions during Garda interviews.
Nolan was convicted by the Special Criminal Court in November 2012 of membership of an unlawful organisation on 11 January that year. He was sentenced the following month to three and a half years in prison. His appeal challenged the conviction, not the sentence.
The charge followed a Garda stop in Limerick. Nolan was a passenger in a car driven by Dermot Gannon, who had previously been convicted of IRA membership. Gardaí found a revolver in a paper bag under the passenger seat. Gannon accepted responsibility for the weapon; Nolan was never accused of possessing it.
In his first six interviews, Nolan said he had been unaware of the gun and described travelling to Limerick with Gannon. In three later interviews, after Gardaí invoked a statutory provision allowing possible inferences from failure to answer material questions in an IRA membership investigation, Nolan declined to answer many questions about his movements and association with Gannon, usually citing his solicitor’s advice. He continued to deny being an IRA member.
The Special Criminal Court found that Nolan understood the provision and had received legal advice. It considered his earlier account of travelling to Limerick “for a spin” incredible and found his later refusals to answer were deliberate. The trial court inferred that he was a member and treated that inference as support for evidence from a senior Garda officer who said he believed Nolan was an IRA member. The trial court had said it would not rely on that belief alone without independent support.
On appeal, Nolan argued that his earlier answers meant there had been no qualifying failure to answer, and that the Garda officer’s belief evidence was unfair because privilege prevented the defence from probing its sources. The Court of Appeal rejected both arguments. It said the trial court could assess the questioning as a whole and decide whether earlier accounts were partial, vague or incredible; it also held that the statutory inference could support the officer’s belief evidence.
The court rejected all six grounds of appeal, found the trial satisfactory and the conviction safe, and dismissed the appeal. It did not reconsider the sentence.