A WOMAN has sued for damages over allegedly being falsely imprisoned and assaulted by a garda after allegedly getting a lift in a patrol car.
Antoinette Canty (30), The Causeway, Tralee, Co Kerry, has brought her action against the Minister for Justice, the Attorney General, the Garda Commissioner and Garda Thomas Noonan arising from an incident on the night of March 16th/17th, 2001. The defendants deny her claims. The court heard the Director of Public Prosecutions decided not to prosecute.
In evidence, Ms Canty said she had left work about 9pm on March 16th, and had drinks with a cousin and later a girlfriend before going to Cronin’s night club in Listowel.
She remembered leaving the nightclub, looking for a taxi and being told there was one up the street. A car parked outside a chip shop was clearly a Garda car with a man in uniform sitting in the driver’s seat, she said. She was a bit nervous asking him for a lift home as she had consumed alcohol but he told her to sit in, she said.
They passed the entrance of her then home at Lixnaw, Listowel, but the driver did not answer her when she pointed this out to him, she said. He later stopped outside her uncle’s house about a half mile away and told her that was her uncle in there.
Ms Canty said she found this “a bit odd”, wanted to get out of the car but could not because the door was locked. She said the driver put his hand on her upper thigh and she started screaming and shouting and kicking the steering wheel and indicators.
“He was trying to get on me to stop me kicking and I had to lie on my back. I just kept kicking to get him off me. I thought he was going to hurt me, rape or kill me”.
She told him to get his hands off her but he was “trying all the time to get on me in a sexual way” and kept repeating she would be all right and he would “look after” her.
Her next recollection was getting out of the car and being in a field about four miles from her home, “running for my life”.
She remembered the car driving off. When Mr Justice Iarfhlaith O’Neill asked had she taken 14 drinks that night, as suggested by counsel for Garda Noonan, she said she was not sure. She could not recall causing any trouble in the nightclub and was not “very drunk”. She could not remember locking herself into two cars.
When it was put to her that she had reconstructed events to blame Garda Noonan, she said: “I know it was Garda Noonan I was attacked by that night.”
The hearing continues.