The High Court has barred the Director of Public Prosecutions from continuing a prosecution against a retired priest accused of four counts of indecent assault and eight counts of buggery dating from 1967 to 1969. The court found a real risk that the accused would not receive a fair trial because evidence that might have tested the complainant’s account had become unavailable.
The judgment, delivered by Mr Justice Hedigan on 6 October 2011, concerned a judicial review application relating to an indictment pending before Dublin Circuit Criminal Court. The complainant was aged between 11 and 13 at the time of the alleged offences. He alleged that the accused, then the local parish priest, took him to the presbytery of Meath Street Church and abused him there. The allegations are not findings of criminal guilt; the Circuit Criminal Court had not tried the charges.
The accused denied knowing the complainant and denied connections to two employers the complainant said the accused had arranged for him. The complainant also alleged that the accused took him to Kevin Street Garda Station, where he was detained. The accused denied doing so. Records and former staff from the two companies could not be located. One named sergeant was dead and another could not be found.
The court identified three potential “islands of fact”: the complainant’s school attendance, the employment claims and the alleged visits to the Garda station. School roll books confirmed the complainant had attended School Street School. The court said that fact confirmed the complainant’s account, though it was more a test of memory than credibility. The missing employment evidence favoured the accused, the judge said, while the missing evidence about the Garda station did not assist either side. The judge also noted that a later account by the complainant about how he obtained one job did not tally with an earlier statement.
The judge accepted that the remaining independent evidence was extremely limited and only peripherally related to the allegations. Considering the age of the accused, his poor health, his residence in a nursing home, the age of the allegations and the loss of potentially relevant evidence together, the court found the case fell within the exceptional circumstances warranting prohibition. The court held that trial directions could not remove the real risk of unfairness and ordered that the DPP be restrained from continuing the prosecution.
The accused had also sought a declaration that buggery was not an offence known to law. The judge did not decide that question, saying the fair-trial ruling disposed of the application and that the Supreme Court was expected to clarify the issue in another case. The order stopped this prosecution; it was not a verdict on whether the accused committed the alleged offences.