The Director of Public Prosecutions is to seek a date for a retrial of Dermot Laide on the charge of the manslaughter of Brian Murphy outside Club Anabel in August 2000.
Laide was last month granted a retrial on the charge of manslaughter by the Court of Criminal Appeal. He did not pursue an appeal against his conviction for violent disorder and now has one year of his sentence completed.
With one-quarter remission he will be due for release in September, unless he is retried and convicted before then.
However, such a retrial, if it goes ahead, is unlikely to be heard before the summer recess at the end of July. The courts do not resume until the beginning of October.
The normal delay in getting a date for a trial which is likely to take a considerable time is a matter of months. However, either before or when a date is sought for this trial it is likely that there will be a challenge to it going ahead, on the basis that a fair trial will not be possible.
Such a challenge could be made either in the Circuit Criminal Court, where a retrial would take place, or in the High Court by way of judicial review to prohibit the DPP from proceeding with the case.
There are at least two grounds for such a challenge. The first is the considerable publicity this case has evoked, not only before and during the first trial, which has already been dealt with by the courts, but in its immediate aftermath and during the various appeals since.
This publicity includes the coverage during the trial of evidence found to be the basis for the quashing of the manslaughter conviction by the Court of Criminal Appeal last month.
Lawyers for Laide are likely to argue that this evidence, based on a statement by one of his co-accused, is now in the public domain and potential jurors will be aware of it, even if it is not introduced in a new trial.
They could also be prejudiced by other media coverage of the case since the original trial.
The second argument likely to arise is that the passage of five years since the events that resulted in the death of Brian Murphy will make the recollection of witnesses less reliable than in the original trial. Even then, many witnesses did not recall clearly the events of that night.
Lawyers for the DPP will argue that evidence exists concerning the role of Dermot Laide in the row that resulted in the death of Brian Murphy, and that this should be put before a jury. They are also likely to argue that a jury can be warned against taking account of media publicity, as it was during the original trial.
The Court of Criminal Appeal found that this issue was dealt with properly in the original trial.