A Co Galway farmer accused of assaulting Minister of State Anne Rabbitte by throwing a bag of cow dung towards her at a public meeting “has a case to answer”, a judge has said.
Judge Alec Gabbett was speaking on Wednesday at Ennis District Court as he rejected an application made last month by defence solicitor Daragh Hassett to dismiss the assault case against Joseph Baldwin. The case is to continue later on Wednesday.
Earlier, the judge said the best evidence available was CCTV footage showing Ms Rabbitte moving to avoid the sealed bag of cow dung, which did not hit the Fianna Fáil politician. Judge Gabbett said the State assault case relied on an assertion by Ms Rabbitte, who was present in court, that she was going to be struck by the bag.
Mr Baldwin (39), of Ballyaneen, Gort, denies assaulting Ms Rabbitte on January 4th, 2023 at a public meeting at O’Sullivan’s Hotel in Gort concerning a planned biogas plant.
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Ms Rabbitte last month wept in the witness box as she recalled the incident. She alleged that before Mr Baldwin threw the bag towards her, he said: “‘I am not forgetting about you, there is one for you Rabbitte’ and then he flung a bag as well.”
After the bag fell on the ground beside her, Ms Rabbitte said: “I didn’t know if the two legs were going to go from under me.”
She said someone picked the bag up and said “it was a bag of s**t” and that “I wanted to scream my head off because no one said that what was happening was wrong”.
Ms Rabbitte said she distracted herself at the meeting by taking out her phone and posting a tweet stating “I can’t believe a bag of s**t has been thrown at me”.
In a prepared statement to gardaí, read out in court, Mr Baldwin said he went to the meeting “with no intention to harm anyone”. He said the first bag fell two to three feet from Fine Gael TD Ciaran Cannon and he threw the second bag in the direction of Ms Rabbitte. He said this “brushed off someone else and fell on the floor near her”.
He said he had earlier gone “down to the farmyard and put dry cow dung into ziplock bags”. He said there was “no smell or odour off the bags and I made sure that they were secure”.
Mr Baldwin said he expected “all the TDs and councillors would be at the top table where I could leave the bags in front of them”.
On why he decided to bring the bags, he said he had told himself “I have had enough” and “something had to be done for them to listen and show them that it was unacceptable for the community to be treated like this”.
“I went to that meeting with no intention to harm anyone,” he said.
Mr Baldwin said he was “not apologising because I believe that all I was doing was making the views of the community known and I didn’t hurt anybody in the process”.
The case continues.
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