The Trib (7 page)

3 May 2009

T
HEY came for Michael Feichin Hannon early in the morning. He was awoken and told he was being taken away for questioning in relation to an alleged sexual assault of a ten-year-old.

What followed was a nightmare for a man who was just twenty-two years of age in 1997, when the matter arose. He was convicted of sexual assault two years later. Fortunately, his sentence was suspended for four years. He moved away from the area, in an attempt to come out from under the dark cloud that envelopes anybody convicted of sexual assault of a minor. In the ignorant discourse that often surrounds sexual offences, he could have been classified as a paedophile.

Last week, he received a certificate of miscarriage of justice following the retraction of the allegation by the girl, who is now a young woman.

A great wrong was perpetrated by the girl, Una Hardester, against Hannon, but he also suffered at the hands of the State. He had no complaint about how the case was investigated, prosecuted or tried. But his experience since the girl's retraction raises a recurring question about how the State conducts itself when innocent people have been wronged in one form or another.

Hardester made her retraction in a statement to a solicitor in November 2006. She had duped the gardaí, prosecutors and the jury at Galway Circuit Criminal Court into believing her story. (The trial largely hung on her word against Hannon's.)

Hannon only found out about the retraction by chance. His sister encountered Hardester at a petrol station in Galway. He contacted his solicitor, who got in touch with the local gardaí. They confirmed that Hardester had made a retraction.

The matter was straightforward. Hannon's solicitor should have been supplied with the statement, which would have allowed for an application to the Court of Criminal Appeal to quash the conviction.

The statement was not forthcoming from the gardaí. It was not forthcoming from the DPP, which had received a copy in November 2006. After numerous attempts, Hannon's solicitor, Michael Finucane, was finally furnished with the statement in March 2008. A letter from the DPP apologised for the delay, saying that the file had been mislaid.

The way was then opened up to have Hannon's name cleared in the Court of Criminal Appeal (CCA). Once the conviction was quashed, Hannon then applied for a certificate of miscarriage of justice. The certificate means that he is entitled to seek compensation from the State.

The DPP objected to the certificate being granted. The office's claim was on the grounds that the State or its agents had done no wrong in the case. The CCA rejected the arguments.

Judge Adrian Hardiman said that the issue was a narrow one – whether a man who was convicted and was now recognised as having been innocent all along was entitled to a certificate. He and his colleagues ruled that Hannon was entitled to it.

The delay in supplying Hannon with the document that would clear his name, and the objection to declaring the case a miscarriage of justice, show the State's agents in a harsh light.

A grave wrong had been perpetrated on a citizen. The State's function is to protect and serve the citizen. Yet there appears to have been a reluctance to acknowledge that something terrible had befallen an innocent man.

Once again, agencies of the State appear to have been more concerned with protecting themselves rather than the citizen, with serving the agency's interests, rather than those of the citizen.

So it was with Brigid McCole, the woman who was poisoned by blood supplied by the State, and fought all the way through the courts when she attempted to have the wrong righted. So it was with the McBreartys in Donegal, who had to fight the whole way to get the State to acknowledge how badly served, how badly protected they as citizens had been. So it goes in other cases, in health, in education, anywhere that the institution's function is questioned.

The culture of circling institutional wagons, rather than rushing to effect reparation is a damning indictment on a State that classifies itself as republican. Opposition politicians often point out these shortcomings. And then, when they join government, they quietly drop their objections. Somewhere along the line, the primacy of the citizen has been lost.

The other feature of the Hannon case is that it throws into sharp relief the might of the State in the criminal justice system. It is fashionable these days for comment on the system to focus on the rights of the accused versus the rights of the victim. This ignores the power of the State that is behind prosecutions, on the same side as the victim, although acting for all citizens.

In such a mismatch, safeguards, checks and balances are always going to be important. The fashionable view is that these safeguards weigh the system heavily in the defendant's favour, despite conviction rates of around 95 per cent. In Hannon's case, it appears there weren't enough safeguards to detect that something was amiss.

Then, when the wrongly convicted man and his accuser both moved to have the wrong righted, it was the State that foot-dragged and attempted to block the process of complete vindication.

The system needs tweaking to respond to the likes of organised crime in today's world. But caution must accompany every change. Nobody wants to be another Michael Feichin Hannon.

20 December 2009

W
hen the London-based Irish comedian Dara Ó Briain appeared on
The Late Late Show
in November, he told an anecdote about his latest television series
Three Men in a Boat
that sees himself and two British comedians travel around Irish waterways. The other comedians, Gryff Rhys Jones and Rory McGrath, kept asking about the tree stump in Rathkeale in Limerick, which locals attested depicted an image of Mary. But Ó Briain played it down, mortified at the ridiculousness of it all, not wanting them to see that part of Ireland, the
Father Ted
Ireland, the Ireland from
The Field
, an Ireland full of ignorance and embarrassments.

After a decade of commentary on the Ireland we were living in, the ‘real' Ireland was called for in moments of reflection, the ‘old' Ireland, which apparently was something to be yearned for.

We got a glimpse of that ‘real' and ‘old' Ireland in a Tralee courtroom last week when about fifty people shook the hand of convicted sex attacker Danny Foley as he awaited his sentencing. They queued in single file before the judge returned to the courtroom, squeezing his hand and embracing him, while his victim sat in the front row of the room accompanied only by gardaí, a rape counsellor and one friend.

‘She cut quite a solitary figure,' a reporter for the
Irish Examiner
said. The incident is of course outrageous. What kind of person would sympathise with a sex attacker who, on CCTV evidence, carried a woman who was drunk behind a skip, forced her to the ground, pinned her down causing scrapes to her wrists and extensive bruising to her back, and pulled off her trousers? When gardaí spotted him crouching over her, he lied, saying he just found her there, semi-conscious. He referred to his victim as ‘yer wan'.

On Newstalk's
Breakfast
programme on Thursday morning, Fr Sean Sheehy, a priest in Listowel – where the incident happened – who appeared in court as a character witness for the thirty-five-year-old bouncer Foley said: ‘My Christian responsibility was to this person that I knew and to the person who is the object of, what I call, this extremely harsh sentence.' Sheehy didn't seem particularly concerned about his ‘Christian responsibility' to a victim of sexual assault, but hey, she wasn't his buddy. Sheehy's shocking behaviour isn't that shocking in light of what we now know about Irish priests, but it does show their strange and disturbing attitude towards sex abuse isn't just confined to paedophilia.

Why dozens of men felt compelled to sympathise with Foley is a complex expression of many attitudes; attitudes to women, attitudes to sex, attitudes to community and solidarity. Perhaps they would have felt differently if Foley was in the dock for attacking their daughter, sister, mother, wife or girlfriend – or perhaps not. But it does show that many people refuse to accept that rapists are very often the supposedly nice upstanding and well-liked family men in our communities. It is rare that the face of sexual assault is an anonymous one in a dark alley; much more often, it's the Danny Foleys of this world – the blokes who go out on the lash in the hope of getting some young wan hammered enough to sleep with them. Sex attackers are our friends and our family members and our neighbours. The people of Listowel find that very hard to swallow.

And while Foley might be typical of sex attackers in Ireland, unfortunately, his victim is very much the exception as a sex-crime victim. She is the exception because she reported the attack. She is the exception because she went through with the legal process of bringing her attacker to court. She is the exception because after her case was brought to court, her attacker was convicted. And she is the exception because that conviction involved a jail sentence.

Despite facing total isolation from her community, she had the almighty bravery to follow through. In her victim-impact statement she said: ‘I feel as if people are judging me the whole time. I've been asked by people I know if I am sorry for bringing Dan Foley to court. I am not sorry for it. All I did was tell the truth.'

It's commendable also that Judge Donagh McDonagh didn't listen to the ‘character reference' from the priest about Foley's respect for women, but it's sad that he needs to be commended because his actions should be automatic.

Is this the Ireland that we want? Where a sexual-assault victim is judged by her community as though it was some delusional nation with an extreme vision of Sharia law? Is this what we have regressed to now? An Ireland of magic tree stumps, and eejits blinding themselves looking for a dancing sun in Knock, of people sympathising with paedophilic priests and colluding bishops, and of men patting the back of a sex criminal?

7 November 2010

J
ust before 30,000 young people took to the streets in the largest student protest of their generation, my flatmate, also a student, hung a banner out the window. It read ‘We Write The Future'. We all write the future, but none more so than a generation who have largely been ignored, disregarded and are now condemned either to unemployment or emigration. This is the moment we stopped confusing apathy with disaffection.

Last week began with a completely idiotic protest, an Éirígí councillor chucking paint on Mary Harney, which did nothing apart from provide a gift to sub-editors on the tabloids the next day. Éirígí was there again at the student protest, along with the Socialist Workers Party. They are to protests what liggers are to launch parties, turning up, constantly unwanted, hanging around, not getting the message that it's not their party. Both groups were instrumental in disrupting what was a peaceful protest. There is no doubt that those involved in causing aggravation at the tail end of the protest were completely wrong. But this protest took place in a context different from previous ones, a context of heightened emotions, anger, desperation, solidarity, determination.

Watching the TV footage, it was impossible to condone many of the gardaí's actions. They stood in rows, batons drawn, shields at the ready, as mounted gardaí assembled behind them. They bashed heads, bloodied noses. None of the protestors were armed or wearing protective clothing, yet even when they were sitting on the ground, the fully Robocopped gardaí saw fit to beat them with batons, knee them, and drag them across the ground by their hair. Eventually, by the time the protestors had reached Anglo Irish Bank on St Stephen's Green, gardaí on horses, again without warning, charged the crowd, who were simply making their way back to where they came from. They were backed up by charging gardaí on foot and armoured garda vans.