A building company owner, former champion boxer and voluntary community worker, Jason Bonney had never come to Garda attention before being charged as one of the getaway drivers who separately drove away each of the six men involved in the Regency hotel attack.
Bonney, now aged 52, with an address at Drumnigh Wood, Portmarnock, Co Dublin, left school aged 14 and worked as an apprentice plasterer before returning to education to pursue a construction course at Bolton Street college.
When aged 23 he set up his own building company which at one stage employed 10 people.
The firm suffered from 2008 onwards due to the collapse of the so-called Celtic Tiger property boom.
Why was Gerard Hutch tried for murder?
Gerard Hutch fails in bid to get State to pay legal costs following acquittal in Regency trial
Inside the Gerard Hutch PR machine: ‘Whether it was intentional or not, he did very well at marketing himself’
Gerard Hutch departs for Spain a month after acquittal of Regency Hotel murder
Bonney went to the UK and worked in construction until 2014. Following a heart attack, he was unable to work for 18 months and lived off rental income derived from his building work. His lawyer said Bonney has always paid his way and at no time has been a financial burden on the State.
Married for 32 years, Bonney has two children, both of whom pursued third-level education. The family also fostered a 12-year-old boy who had grown up in care and whom they got to know as a friend of one of the children.
That boy, now a man, provided a testimonial full of praise for Bonney, whom he said had a “huge heart” and was “always there for me”.
Bonney, who took up boxing aged 10, won three national titles and represented Ireland in international boxing competitions. He had acted as a club coach and was president of Trinity boxing club on a voluntary basis.
In several testimonials provided to the court, Bonney was described as a hard-working family man who did a lot for his community.
The testimonials include one from his brother, who said that, despite the “obvious split” in the family, he and Bonney had remained close. He described Bonney as honest, hard-working and a good person.
The family split was brought into sharp focus after Bonney was sentenced on Friday.
In a statement to RTÉ news after the sentence, Bonney’s two sisters were very critical of Bonney’s claim, and of evidence given during the trial to corroborate it, that their father William was the driver of a black BMW jeep on February 5th, 2016, the day of the Regency attack.
William Bonney died in 2019 and his wife Gretta in 2021 and Jason Bonney’s claims concerning William Bonney driving the jeep were made after the death of both.
The court rejected that evidence as false after accepting rebuttal evidence from Bonney’s brother-in-law, Paul Byrne.
Jason Bonney, the court found, was the driver of the BMW jeep and was the getaway driver for Kevin ‘Flatcap’ Murray, a former dissident republican, since deceased, who was among the Regency attackers.
