A convicted sex abuser yesterday failed in his attempt to privately prosecute former minister for justice, Mr John O'Donoghue, for allegedly perverting the course of justice in his case.
A former Northern Ireland human rights activist, Vincent McKenna (39), was jailed in 2001 for three years for repeatedly sexually assaulting his daughter. The sentence was later appealed by the DPP as too lenient, and the Court of Criminal Appeal doubled it.
Yesterday McKenna unsuccessfully sought to have summonses issued against Mr O'Donoghue, two lawyers who prosecuted the case against him and a journalist who wrote a report calling him a sex beast.
Had he succeeded, all four people would have been required to attend court for a possible full hearing of his allegations.
He claimed public interviews given by Mr O'Donoghue when he was minister for justice were allegedly unlawful communications to the DPP to appeal the leniency of his sentence.
Mr O'Donoghue was politically driven to "bury me", he said, because his work as a campaigner against IRA human rights abuses had embarrassed the government.
He accused Mr O'Donoghue of getting gardaí to arrest him while he was in prison and have him questioned for five hours immediately after his first attempt to bring a private prosecution last year. He claimed gardaí asked him "what was my problem with John O'Donoghue".
He continued to protest his innocence of the sex abuse charges and claimed his daughter, Sorcha, who had waived her right to anonymity following his trial, had been paid by someone to make the allegations.
"I had no idea why the allegations were made and I have been made aware the complainant [Sorcha] received substantial funds from a third party before I went to trial," he said.
He claimed he had been seriously assaulted while in prison and attacked on another occasion by the IRA while at a courthouse.
McKenna also asked the court for summonses against the two lawyers who prosecuted the case against him, Mr Peter Charleton SC and a solicitor, Mr Brian McCreery, claiming they had wrongly accused him of saying there was a conspiracy between his former wife and estranged daughter in bringing the sex allegations.
He sought another summons against an Irish Sun reporter, Myles McEntee, accusing him of incitement to hatred in an article he wrote.
Lawyers for the DPP and Mr O'Donoghue argued that his application was an abuse of process and an attempt to reopen a case which had been dealt with in two higher courts. The evidence against him had come not just from his daughter but from his ex-wife, who said he had apologised to her for what he did to Sorcha, who was sexually abused between the ages of four and 13.
He had no evidence to back up his allegations against the people he was seeking summonses against. He had failed to meet any threshold on which the principles of such applications were based, and it would not be in the public interest to grant the summonses.
His allegation against the Sun reporter could not be entertained as he was not part of any distinct group which the incitement-to-hatred law required in order to constitute an offence.
Judge David Anderson said there was a "total evidential void" in the application being made.