Three-time All-Ireland winning Limerick hurler, Pat Ryan, successfully appealed a jail sentence and conviction for perjury on Thursday, seven months after he had pleaded guilty to lying during criminal proceedings against him.
Judge Tom O’Donnell allowed his appeal in the case in which Mr Ryan admitted last March that he lied under oath before a court in October 2020 over alleged speeding.
Mr Ryan (28), from Doon, Co Limerick, was appealing the severity of a two-week jail sentence imposed on him by Judge Patricia Harney at Limerick District Court, last March.
Jailing Mr Ryan for two weeks last March, Judge Harney told the former Limerick hurling star he had told “a brazen lie”.
When Mr Ryan was called to give evidence in the 2020 speeding case he falsely told the court that he did not receive a summons for the alleged speeding offence.
The perjury came to light later, when gardaí acting on a separate investigation, discovered a photograph of the speeding summons sent from Mr Ryan’s mobile phone to the phone of an unidentified third party.
Text messages about the summons had also been exchanged between both phones, the court heard.
Mr Ryan’s solicitor John Herbert argued at an earlier hearing of the appeal that Mr Ryan had been ignorant of the law and courts and the serious consequences of convictions for offences such as “falsehoods, telling lies or deceit”.
Padraig Mawe, State solicitor for Limerick city,
told the court today that perjury was a “serious offence”, and he noted Mr Ryan had come to court with “an unblemished record”.
At an earlier hearing of Mr Ryan’s appeal last May judge Tom O’Donnell said perjury was an offence that “strikes at the very heart of the administration of justice”.
He said Limerick senior hurlers were “role models for the generation to come” and it had been “disappointing” that one of them was before the criminal courts.
Allowing Mr Ryan’s appeal today, Judge Tom O’Donnell said what Mr Ryan did was “very wrong, no doubt about it”.
However, Judge O’Donnell said that given the “highly unusual circumstances of the case” as well as the “enormous publicity” the case had already received in the media, he had “serious concerns that the impact of a conviction of this nature would be completely disproportionate”.
“The law is one thing, and justice is another,” Judge O’Donnell said.
The judge said he had not made a formal order for Mr Ryan to participate in community service in lieu of a jail sentence, but noted that Mr Ryan had “voluntarily engaged” with the probation services and completed 100 hours of community service “with impeccable aplomb”.
Mr Ryan, wearing a grey cap and dark navy jacket and slacks, did not speak during the hearing.