???????Does anyone, anywhere, think that just maybe, a little apology might be in order?
When Richard Walker, then a quite junior solicitor in the Chief State Solicitor's Office, put the phone down on May 16th, 1984, and recorded dutifully a memo of a conversation he had just had, he can have had little sense that 17 years on a judgment of the Court of Criminal Appeal would describe what he wrote as "bordering on the sensational".
Walker wrote:
Note for Circuit Court Section: Garda Thornton mentioned to me that Eamon Gavin had asked to see a book of photographs to see if he could identify any of the people who had taken his car - he saw a book containing 50 photographs and identified one of the accused. This was prior to the court identification. Should additional evidence in relation to this be brought? Walker in his neat handwriting, carefully initialled and dated the memo: R.W. 16.5.84.
That memo led yesterday to the granting of the first certificate under section 9 of the Criminal Procedure Act 1993 to Joseph Meleady and Joseph Grogan. The certificate affirms that the two young men have been the victims of a miscarriage of justice. Each of them was sentenced to five years' penal servitude. They can now expect the State to compensate them generously for all they have been put through.
The court's judgment was a moment of sweet satisfaction for two families who have suffered severely by the State's mishandling of this case over 17 long years. Yesterday, as they celebrated quietly across the river from the Four Courts, an air of gentle incredulity was present.
Had they really won? Was it really over?
The Tallaght Two case has been an extraordinary saga of error, confusion, misjudgment and sheer obstinacy by the prosecution authorities. Unfortunately, yesterday's ruling, while it restored justice long denied, did little to explain how this case could have dragged on for so long or how it could have been so mishandled by the gardai, the Chief State Solicitor's Office and the Director of Public Prosecutions. That task remains.
Meleady and Grogan were convicted solely on the identification evidence of Eamon Gavin. He has always maintained total certainty, despite the fact that he had never seen the boys before his car was taken, that he only saw them under darkened circumstances of great trauma, and despite the well-documented fact that such uncorroborated identification evidence is notoriously unreliable and dangerous.
Yesterday's ruling found unambiguously that in the light of the Walker memo, there was a danger that Mr Gavin was shown photographs before he made the identification which led to the two boys' conviction. The court found this, despite strong denials from Mr Gavin and Sgt Thornton that any such photographs were shown.
The court felt the trial judge would, had he known of the Walker memo, consider it unsafe to allow Mr Gavin's identification evidence to go to the jury. It said this was not an opinion that photographs were shown to Mr Gavin, just that there was a "real danger" that they were. If they were, the court had not been told it, and the subsequent informal identification made in Rathfarnham courthouse would have been invalidated.
Serious questions remain for many on the prosecution side, questions which yesterday's judgment did not address. There has been no mystery about the true culprits in this case for at least 15 of the last 17 years. One of them, Paul McDonnell, was brave enough to come forward and admit his role in the crime, only to be charged with and convicted of perjury.
The other, Gordon (Gus) Dunne told the world of his guilt, informally, then did a 1986 RTE television interview and another in 1988 with Frank Connolly in Magill magazine. The State, it can safely be taken, was not interested.
To put it in the vernacular, this case was totally screwed up. Why exactly it was screwed up the courts have not explored. That should be a job for the State itself, but it shows no sign of being capa ble of such painful self-examination.
Nor have the courts explored why no party appears to have taken responsibility for the various failures to disclose vital evidence to the defence or to have taken any remedial action even when the non-disclosures became simply unavoidable. And does anyone, anywhere, think that just maybe, a little apology might be in order at this time?
Michael Heney is a journalist with RTE and the author of The Tallaght Two, pub- lished in 1995 by Gill and Macmillan. He produced the television programme The Scandalous Case of the Tallaght Two, which led directly to the discovery of the Walker memo