The Dublin county coroner was biased in his conduct of an inquest resulting in a unanimous jury verdict that an unidentified dead baby girl found in a laneway in Dún Laoghaire in 1973 was the child of Cynthia Owen, the High Court was told yesterday.
Ms Owen has claimed the baby was conceived following sexual abuse in her family home and was murdered.
The father and three sisters of Ms Owen are seeking to overturn the inquest verdict which was handed down on February 16th.
A statement made by Ms Owen regarding the alleged birth of a baby in the family home in Dalkey and her subsequent murder and disposal by a family member was "entirely untrue", her father and three of her sisters have claimed.
Her sister Catherine Stevenson said in an affidavit that Ms Owen had not given birth to a child in the family home in 1973 as alleged and did not have a stillborn child at 14 but had made "increasingly wild" allegations against family members of sexual abuse and by people in the locality. She was "constantly reviewing her list of alleged abusers and adding to it".
Although the DPP had concluded there was insufficient evidence to prosecute anyone for murder of the baby, and members of the family had warned coroner Dr Kieran Geraghty not to reopen the inquest as it would be "used" by Ms Owen to make allegations, ultimately leading to "a murder trial under the guise of an inquest", Dr Geraghty had proceeded with the inquest, they said.
Ms Owen had given "wildly different versions" of events alleged to have happened in 1973, the four contend.
However, the coroner had wrongly excluded from the jury a number of conflicting statements made by Ms Owen and by others whose evidence contradicted that of Ms Owen's, they claim. Nor was the jury given evidence about the merits and weaknesses of "retrieved memory syndrome".
Dr Geraghty was "extremely selective" about the statements the jury was permitted to hear, according to Nuala Butler SC, for the four applicants.
It is claimed he should not have proceeded with the inquest in the absence of a body after he was refused permission by the Minister for Justice to have the body exhumed from the Little Angels plot in Glasnevin Cemetery.
Mr Justice Michael Peart yesterday granted leave to Ms Butler, for Peter Murphy snr and three of Ms Owen's sisters - Ms Stevenson, Esther Roberts and Margaret Stokes - to bring judicial review proceedings against Dr Geraghty aimed at overturning the jury's verdict last February.
The proceedings arise from the inquest by Dr Geraghty into the death of the baby girl whose body, wrapped in newspapers in a plastic bag, was found in a laneway in Dún Laoghaire on April 4th, 1973.
On February 16th, the jury found the baby was the child of Cynthia Owen. She had claimed the baby, whom she later named Noeleen Murphy, was conceived as a result of sexual abuse at the family home in Dalkey.
The jury found the baby died at the family home, that the cause of death was haemorrhage due to stab wounds and it returned an open verdict. Dr Geraghty had advised the jury it could not return a verdict of unlawful killing as it would "implicate people" in criminal activity and this was outside the remit of an inquest.
Ms Butler yesterday said an earlier inquest of 1973 into the baby's death was held before another coroner and was adjourned indefinitely.
She would be contending that the Coroners Act required such an inquest to be resumed before the same coroner and that the Act was breached in relation to how the inquest was resumed before Dr Geraghty from 2005.
Her clients were also alleging bias by Dr Geraghty in his decision to exclude from the jury statements which did not corroborate Ms Owen's account, his refusal to deal with certain queries from the jury and his predisposition to believe Ms Owen's evidence against other members of her family and others.
Her clients were also prejudiced due to the delay in resuming the inquest. Important witnesses had died, including two gardaí involved in the investigation into the child's death and the pathologist who carried out the postmortem on the baby.
In an affidavit on behalf of all four applicants, Ms Stevenson said Ms Owen had from 1994 given several versions of events concerning the alleged birth, murder and disposal of the baby girl. Statements by Ms Owen to the Garda and the information she gave to her medical advisers and counsellors were "significantly at variance with one another".
