Our proper loathing of organised crime should not blind us to two extraordinary features in the recent trial of Patrick Eugene Holland. One was its nature; the other was the absence of any public disquiet about that nature. Dear me, what uproar would have been raised if an alleged IRA man had been so tried here - or, particularly, in Britain.
We have apparently introduced three-tier justice, and nobody seems the least perturbed by it. The first tier is the ordinary criminal code, with juries and rules of evidence that we have trouble understanding. The second is the terrorist tier, without juries, with incomprehensible rules of evidence which sometimes seem dedicated to the proposition that the least documentary flaw should lead to an acquittal. And the third tier is that pioneered in the case of Patrick Eugene Holland, who was tried before the juryless Special Criminal Court, not on any of the normal schedule of terrorist charges, but on charges of possessing cannabis resin, under fascinating rules of evidence.
Dun Laoghaire arrest
A garda told the Holland trial that she had arrested him at Dun Laoghaire ferry port on a charge of possessing a gun in the belief that he had murdered Veronica Guerin. She adduced no evidence for this, presumably because she had none, and the allegation was then not pursued - yet not merely was this allegation allowed to stand within the general body of the evidence, but Veronica Guerin's murder, which was wholly irrelevant to the charges of possession of cannabis, was repeatedly adverted to in the course of the trial.
Evidence against Holland was given by Charles Bowden, the only person in this entire case I know. I met him once in a pub, and I liked him. He and his associates were in good form that night, because they were celebrating. Earlier that day, unknown to me of course, they had contrived the murder of my fellow-journalist Veronica Geurin - a deed of such surpassing wickedness that no further comment is necessary.
Charley - I think of him as that, despite his association with Veronica's assassination: in my dismal experience, those involved in murder are seldom personally objectionable - is a self-confessed dealer in drugs, a professional criminal. He told the court that he had prepared the gun for Veronica's murder. But that was simply unrelated to the charge Holland faced, though it no doubt served usefully to muddy the well of public opinion against Holland. More relevantly, he said he ran the warehouse operation trading in cannabis from which Holland was one of many purchasers. Charley is a likeable fellow but a crook; yet his word, virtually unaided, and strongly denied by the accused, secured a conviction.
Accomplice evidence
The Court accepted that it was dangerous to convict on the uncorroborated evidence of an accomplice. However, there was alleged corroboration from Holland, ruled Mr Justice Johnson, in the shape of statements supposedly made by him in Lucan Garda Station, in which he apparently accepted he was known as "The Wig" (a name which appeared in the cannabis warehouse accounts), and when asked about 35 kg of cannabis, he conveniently replied: "Look lads, I have my own customers, I am not going to implicate them."
Needless to say, in court Holland denied uttering these idiotically damning words. And with this strongly disputed statement from a hardened criminal (that was neither tape-recorded nor videoed and was made while his solicitor himself was in Garda custody) serving as corroboration of evidence given by another criminal, now turned supergrass, a conviction was obtained. Not a little astoundingly, the judge said there were other items of corroboration in the evidence that the court did not intend to list in the judgment.
What would the reaction be if such evidence, such rulings and such reticence graced an IRA trial in England, resulting in conviction and 20 years' imprisonment? There would be uproar. And even now, we have not exhausted the improbabilities of this case. The court was told on sentencing that Holland had been previously been convicted for possession of gelignite, but not for subversive use.
In that trial at the Special Criminal Court in 1989, however, Mr Justice Robert Barr said otherwise. He declared that he was satisfied the explosives (7lbs of gelignite, detonators, cortex and fuse) were for the IRA, and that the four defendants before him (including Holland and Michael O'Reilly from Belfast, whom the judge declared was in or close to the IRA) must have been aware that bombs could have been made from the gelignite which could possibly cause death or serious injury. "The court must impose exemplary sentences to deter those who might be tempted to supply explosive substances to the IRA."
Judicial deterrence
Putting aside these two contrasting versions of the truth, courtesy of the Special Criminal Court, we may now balance that court's judicial deterrences. For the crime of supplying cannabis (which that court was not set up to try), 20 years; for the crime of supplying gelignite to the IRA, for possible murder in the North, 10 years.
At one level, we could ask: had the IRA been tackled with the same vigour and juridical ingenuity with which Veronica's murderers were pursued by this State, could it have operated so successfully in the Republic for the past quarter of a century?
Or at another and opposing level, might we not expect that, even for such as Patrick Eugene Holland, justice should always be seen to be done?