The Supreme Court allowed Veronica Noonan’s appeal and prohibited her further prosecution, ruling that the delay in bringing her case to trial seriously breached her right to a trial with reasonable expedition.
The charges concerned allegations that, between January 1990 and May 1992, Noonan fraudulently caused credit union board members to sign blank cheques. She worked as a bookkeeper at a credit union in Cabra, Dublin. The judgment records that the prosecution initially named two board members in the charges, but later removed May Walters from the charge sheet without explanation. Walters died in January 2000.
An inspection followed anonymous calls to the Irish League of Credit Unions in 1992. The League made a complaint to gardaí on 4 September that year. Noonan was arrested in February 1995 and first charged in December 1997. Fifteen further charges followed some months later. She was sent forward for trial on 4 July 2002, almost ten years after the complaint.
Noonan sought judicial review to prevent the trial, arguing that the delays and the death of a potentially favourable witness prejudiced her defence. The High Court refused relief in July 2004, concluding that impairment of the defence had not been demonstrated and that the delay was not enough to justify stopping the prosecution. Noonan appealed.
In the Supreme Court judgment delivered by Justice Hardiman, the Court rejected the view that delays caused by court-system capacity could not count against the State. It said the State’s responsibility to provide a trial within a reasonable time extended across its institutions. The judgment described the case as not unduly complicated and said the nearly decade-long period before trial required a detailed explanation that had not been provided.
Justice Hardiman also disagreed with the High Court’s conclusion that there was no prejudice. The judgment said Walters might have been a favourable defence witness and that her death disadvantaged Noonan. It noted that Walters’s name had been removed from the charges before her death.
The order stopped further prosecution of Noonan on these charges. The Supreme Court did not determine whether the allegations were true or make findings on Noonan’s guilt.