Court awards damages for unlawful detention of men convicted of acquiring weapons for Real IRA

The High Court has awarded €2,500 in damages to each of three men jailed for trying to acquire weapons for the Real IRA for a period of their incarceration found by the Irish Courts to have been unlawful.

In his judgment, Mr Justice Cian Ferriter held that Fintan O’Farrell, Declan Rafferty and Michael McDonald, who are all from Co Louth, were entitled to succeed in their claim for false imprisonment and damages.

However, he said the men were not entitled to substantial damages as, among other reasons, the sentences they originally received for terrorist offences from an English court were not invalidated.

The three men had attempted to source arms and financial support from the Iraqi government. They were arrested by Slovakian police in July 2001 after they met who the men believed were Iraqi arms dealers.

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The ‘dealers’ were undercover British security agents. Following their arrests, all three were extradited to England.

In 2002 they all pleaded guilty before a London court to conspiracy to cause explosions as well as charges under the UK’s 2000 Terrorism Act and received prison sentences of 28 years each.

In 2006 they were transferred to Portlaoise Prison.

In 2014 the High Court found the continued detention of O’Farrell and Rafferty, with addresses in Carlingford, and McDonald, from Dundalk, was unlawful, and their release was ordered.

This was because of differences between the UK and Ireland sentencing systems including that prisoners in Ireland are entitled to one-quarter remission of their sentences whereas in the UK one-third remission normally applies.

The courts, arising out of an earlier unrelated case held that the warrants allowing their transfer from a UK prison to Ireland were defective in referring to the men’s 28-year sentences and not the term they should have served, which was 18 years and 8 months.

The warrants should have referred to a definite term of two-thirds of the sentences they received in the UK, the Irish courts further held.

The three sought damages for the time they spent in prison that the Irish courts deemed to be unlawful.

The period of false imprisonment, they claimed, amounted to breaches of their constitutional right to liberty.

The men, represented by Micheal Ó Higgins SC, David Conlan Smith SC and Declan Higgins BL, instructed by solicitor John Quinn, brought their claims against the Minister for Justice, Ireland, the Attorney General, and the Governor of Portlaoise Prison.

They claimed the defendants were negligent on grounds including that they allowed the men to be imprisoned on foot of an order that was invalid and failed to observe their rights to liberty.

The men claimed they spent eight years in Portlaoise Prison, which they described as an old facility with poor heating and that they had to ‘slop out’ their cells every morning.

The defendants opposed the claim.

In his decision, the judge said that while the errors in the process leading to the defective warrants were not merely trivial he found no evidence of the defendants having been party to a knowing breach of the plaintiffs’ rights.

The judge did not accept as well-founded the defendants’ submission that the three men’s conduct would justify the court not awarding them damages.

Such an approach could lead to the “complete negation of the important role of vindication of the constitutional right to liberty which is fulfilled by an award of damages in a false imprisonment case”, he added.

However, the effect of the finding that the warrants were unlawfully issued was “not to invalidate the underlying English sentences”, he said.

As a result of their admitted conduct in committing serious terrorist offences, the plaintiffs had no lawful entitlement to serve less than 18 years 8 months in prison.

“Any equitable approach to damages cannot ignore the fact that the plaintiffs through their conduct and through the passing of English sentences which have never been invalidated stood to serve over 18 years in prison subject to remission,” he said.

As matters transpired, they spent only just over 13 years in prison, the judge added.

“In my view, any approach to the assessment of damages for their false imprisonment has to reflect that reality,” the judge said.

All three, he said, were entitled to €2,500 damages each.

The judge said he had arrived at that figure based on facts including that the three were detained in Portlaoise Prison on foot of an invalid Irish detention order for an eight-year period of which he said just under 4 years was actionable.

Other facts the court took into consideration when arriving at the level of the awards included that the men’s conduct for extremely serious terrorist offences meant that their interest in liberty before the expiry of the sentences handed down by the English Courts “was attenuated to negligible levels”.

As a result of their release the plaintiffs spent less time in prison as a whole than they were lawfully sentenced to serve by the English courts, the judge said.

Had they remained in England, they would not have been released before their sentences, less any period for remission, had been completed.

Their claims of suffering personal inconvenience, stress, and frustration on missing out while in Portlaoise Prison on key life events counted for little or nothing in the scales of what an equitable award would require in the circumstances, Mr Justice Ferriter added.