An ecstasy dealer and convicted murderer told a jury yesterday how his father set up another drug dealer to be killed.
Scott Delaney told the Central Criminal Court on the night Mark Dwyer was killed, his father announced "he was letting Mark get shot".
Mr Joseph Delaney (53), formerly of La Rochelle, Naas, Co Kildare, has denied the charge that he, with his son, Scott, then 22, murdered Mark Dwyer (23), on or about December 14th, 1996.
Mr Delaney has also pleaded not guilty to imprisoning Mark Dwyer at Foster Terrace, Ballybough, Dublin, on December 14th, 1996. Scott Delaney is serving a life sentence at Arbour Hill Prison after being convicted of murdering Mr Dwyer last October. He was also sentenced to 10 years for falsely imprisoning Mr Dwyer.
Scott Delaney told the court yesterday he did not give evidence or tell the truth during his original trial because his father told him not to.
In 1996, he said, he made his living from selling drugs, mainly ecstasy. He agreed he was "a wholesaler" and said he was part of a gang led by his father. He named five other men, including Mark Dwyer, as being "in the business".
In October 1996, his father got 40,000 ecstasy tablets in Amsterdam. They were brought through France to Paris and on to Cherbourg, where a man called "The Killer" was to arrange for them to be imported to Dublin on a boat.
Mark Dwyer went to collect the bag of tablets at a pub in Grangegorman but rang him later to say "the bag had nothing in it."
He described a meeting at La Rochelle at which he, his father, Mark Dwyer, Dwyer's brother Christopher and another man, Christopher Curry, were present. The meeting was called to discuss the shipment, and who might be responsible for it.
After that meeting, his father had met "The Killer" in a pub in Dublin. "The Killer was crying and saying `I didn't do it' ", and the blame "was shifting in Mark's direction". When he heard that Dwyer had been out "trying to sell the loot to other people" his father's view "was to take him out".
Mark Dwyer was shot "out in the field, somewhere around Kildare", Scott Delaney said, but he denied he was there himself when it happened.
The trial continues today before Mr Justice Barr.