The High Court has refused a judicial review application challenging a warrant used to search The Golden Grill in Letterkenny, and lifted a stay on a District Court prosecution arising from the search.
Mr Justice O’Keeffe delivered judgment on 27 May 2009. The applicant, Paul McGlinchey, acting as nominee of The Golden Grill (Letterkenny) Limited, had sought to quash the warrant issued on 29 March 2008, have seized goods returned and obtain other relief. The judgment does not order the return of the goods.
The application followed a Garda search of the premises and seizure of intoxicating liquor. Inspector M. Walker’s sworn information said the business had not renewed its publican’s licence since 2006. It recounted that McGlinchey admitted having no licence, refused a demand to close, and that about 200 people were present while alcohol was being sold. Those were assertions in the information, not findings made in this judicial review judgment.
The applicant argued, among other things, that the warrant cited a wrongly named 1874 Act and did not identify who swore the information or expressly record that the District Judge was satisfied the legal test had been met. The Director of Public Prosecutions opposed the application, arguing that the warrant sufficiently identified the statutory basis and that any challenge to the seized evidence belonged before the trial court.
The judge found there was no prescribed warrant format under section 24 and no statutory requirement for the warrant to name the informant or include the additional recital proposed by the applicant. The wording that it appeared from information on oath that there was reasonable ground to believe liquor was being sold or kept for sale without authorisation complied with the section, he said. The imprecise title of the Act was not a fundamental flaw, and the applicant had not displaced the presumption that the District Judge acted lawfully.
The court also gave an alternative reason for refusing relief: because a prosecution was pending and the warrant had been executed, the trial judge was the proper person to decide whether evidence from the search was admissible. The High Court did not decide the admissibility of that evidence or the underlying charge. It refused the application and lifted the stay on the District Court prosecution.