Vincent Banks jailed five years for IRA membership

This report is a localnews.ie summary based on public court reporting and records; sources are listed below.

Vincent Banks was jailed for five years for IRA membership by the Special Criminal Court on 23 October 2017. Banks, 49, of Smithfield Gate Apartments in Dublin, had been found guilty in July of membership of an illegal organisation.

The court heard that the PSNI established a forensic link between the shooting of prison officer David Black and a Toyota Camry found burnt out in a ditch further along the motorway. Mr Black was killed in November 2012. The report said Banks bought the car and used a false name on its log-book. His right thumbprint was found on the registration certificate.

Gardaí found Banks’s jacket and an ordnance survey map in his friend’s car. The map had the page displaying Co Leitrim torn out and bore his fingerprints. In Banks’s apartment, officers found a copy of the Evening Herald open on a story about the murder.

Ms Justice Isobel Kennedy, presiding at the three-judge court, described Banks as a “trusted member of an unlawful organisation” who was in a position to obtain the vehicle surreptitiously. His lack of relevant previous convictions was a mitigating factor, the court heard.

Banks had been cleared of withholding information related to the murder at a previous trial in 2014.