Material refused on relevancy grounds

EVIDENCE:CATHERINE NEVIN argued her conviction was unsafe on grounds of material which she claimed affected the credibility of three prosecution witnesses – William McClean, Gerry Heapes, and John Jones – and, possibly, the credibility and connections of a fourth State witness, Patrick Russell.

She claimed new facts were contained in Special Branch files relating to these four witnesses and Tom Nevin but the trial judge refused to admit the material as evidence on grounds of lack of relevancy.

She also claimed newly discovered facts showed Mr McClean had paramilitary connections at the time of her trial and/or was a paid State informer since 1974 and that Mr Heapes and Mr Jones were also paid informers at the time of her trial.

The failure of the DPP and/or the trial judge to make any adequate disclosure of this newly discovered material rendered the trial inherently flawed, she claimed. Counsel for Nevin also argued another document, a Garda “suspect antecedent form”, may have placed Mr McClean as a suspect “in this matter” due to Mr McClean’s alleged presence – which he denied – in the Four Courts Hotel in Dublin in days preceding the Dublin/Monaghan bombings in 1974. Material given to Mr Justice Henry Barron, who investigated the bombings, had led that judge to form the view that Mr McClean had a known association with a well-known loyalist paramilitary, Joseph Stewart Young, it was claimed.

Mr Justice Hardiman, delivering the three-judge appeal court decision, said the newly discovered facts could only be said to be relevant because they went to the credibility of Mr McClean, a witness produced by the prosecution at the trial as one of the three men solicited to kill Mr Nevin.

The only conceivable basis upon which Mr McClean could have been questioned about whether or not he was the man in the hotel was that it was relevant to credibility, the judge said.

Because that was a collateral issue, Mr McClean’s answer would have been binding on the questioner and could not have been taken any further, he said. The purpose of that rule was to prevent a trial becoming encumbered by perhaps an unlimited number of quite different issues for which the other party might or might not be prepared.

The appeal court ruled there was nothing in the Garda material, the “suspect antecedent form” or in a bundle of more than 140 other such forms inspected by the court which gave “the slightest credence, direct or indirect, express or implied” to the allegation the witnesses were informers.

Mr McClean was an associate of Mr Heapes, who served jail for a robbery carried out on behalf of the IRA, and of Mr Jones, who ran a Sinn Féin advice centre, and this information was not concealed during the trial and was in fact an essential context of Mr McClean’s evidence, the judge said.

It was the evidence of gardaí in this miscarriage of justice application that Mr McClean was not a suspect for the murder of Mr Nevin and this was not challenged, the judge added. The material relating to the alleged presence of Mr McClean in the Four Courts Hotel was “simply too remote to meet the criteria for significant newly discovered facts”.

The judge added the case made by Nevin was in certain important particulars “very vague”. It had been claimed on behalf of Nevin that her solicitor had been informed by a “high-level journalist” the three main State witnesses were “high-level State informers” at the time of the trial, he noted. “This is hearsay of the rankest sort, vague in the extreme and simply irrelevant to the issues on this application.”

The court also rejected another claim by Nevin in relation to the alleged attempt by a man, “C”, to get an alibi for the night of the murder from another man, “T”, during a meeting in a pub at which Mr Heapes was allegedly present. It was not clear in what way the evidence of “T” would have weakened the prosecution case, the judge said.

Like so many other matters mentioned, this was “simply irrelevant”, he added.