In February 1999, less than three months after Philip Sheedy was released from prison, his barrister, Luigi Rea, had a chat outside the Law Library with Brian McGreary, an official in the criminal trials section of the office of the Chief State Solicitor.
The family of Mrs Anne Ryan, the woman killed in 1996 when Philip Sheedy crashed into their car, had discovered by accident that he was now at large. Brian McGreary's office was "being put under pressure" for an explanation by the Ryan family and the Garda. He hoped that Luigi Rea, who had represented Sheedy at the hearing in which he was released, might be able to tell him what was going on.
According to Brian McGreary, Luigi Rea agreed to talk to him off the record. They spoke first about the possibility of the State appealing the decision to release Philip Sheedy. Then the barrister hinted that there were hidden forces at work in all of this.
As Brian McGreary would remember it, Luigi Rea told him, "totally off the record", that "this matter is being dealt with by people in much higher authority than either me or you". He said: "A Supreme Court judge has an involvement in this case." He added that when he represented Philip Sheedy the previous November, "it was his understanding that Judge [Cyril] Kelly knew the position and everything would be OK."
In the course of the investigation undertaken by the then Chief Justice, Mr Liam Hamilton, Luigi Rea denied making any of these comments about a Supreme Court judge and Cyril Kelly, while Brian McGreary stuck to his recollection.
If those few words were spoken, their implications are startling. They suggest a level of collusion between the Supreme Court judge in question, Hugh O'Flaherty, and Cyril Kelly which is flatly denied by both men.
By examining the conflicting memories of Brian McGreary and Luigi Rea, a public investigation might get close to the heart of a mystery which continues to undermine public confidence in both the political and judicial arms of government. The extraordinary thing is that no such investigation has taken place. After almost a year and a half of headlines, accusations and controversies, key questions in the Sheedy affair have been left dangling.
Before it became either a court case or a political scandal, the Sheedy case was a human catastrophe. On March 15th, 1996 the young architect, driving at high speed and under the influence of alcohol, ploughed his car into the Glenview roundabout in Tallaght and it somersaulted into the air, landing on another car.
Anne Ryan was driving. Her husband, John, was in the front passenger seat. Their two young sons, James and George, were in the back. Anne Ryan was killed and her family suffered injuries that eventually healed and grief that will never do so.
About noon on October 20th, 1997, Circuit Court Judge Joseph Matthews was in his chambers at the Four Courts building when the phone rang. On the line was his colleague, Cyril Kelly. He wanted to know if Judge Matthews would be free to take a case during the lunchtime recess. The main charge was dangerous driving causing death.
It was, he told Judge Matthews, obviously a tragic case, but the accused was a "graduate" from "a good family" and had plenty of money to pay compensation to the family. He had negotiated privately with the lawyers for the prosecution and the defence. An informal deal had been worked out: in return for a guilty plea and the payment of compensation, Philip Sheedy would get a suspended sentence.
But he wanted to hand the case over to Judge Matthews because he himself had become "too close" to it.
When he read the file on the case, Judge Matthews was taken aback. It did not look to him at all like the kind of crime that merits a suspended sentence. The book of evidence showed "recklessness of an extraordinary degree" on Sheedy's part. He wondered whether Cyril Kelly might have been so busy that he did not actually read the file and so missed the sheer gravity of what had happened on Glenview roundabout.
He was so concerned that he went over to Judge Kelly's chambers to tell him that he simply could not impose a suspended sentence on Philip Sheedy. Cyril Kelly did not reply. He just stretched out both his arms and made a face. Judge Matthews understood the gesture to mean: "If that's what you think, then that's what you must do."
And so, when he heard the case, Judge Matthews sentenced Philip Sheedy to four years with liberty to apply for a review after two years. Effectively, this meant that Philip Sheedy would be out of prison in November 1999.
Two weeks later, though, Philip Sheedy's lawyers were back before Judge Matthews, asking him to set aside the review date. Though this was a rather unusual request, it was not, as Hugh O'Flaherty implied in his interviews this week, an odd injustice to Philip Sheedy.
The review date meant that he would serve at least two years. Without it, the chances were that the revolving door system for freeing up prison places would ensure that a graduate from a "good family" could hope for so-called "temporary release" long before the two years were up. With this in mind, Judge Matthews granted the request.
Among Philip Sheedy's family and in some quarters of the Four Courts, however, there was a lingering belief that the young architect had been given a raw deal. The private negotiations with Cyril Kelly had created an expectation that Sheedy would not go to prison at all.
That expectation, moreover, was generally in line with what people of his background and social standing had come to anticipate in any dealings they might have with the criminal courts. Over time, those broad assumptions hardened into a series of actions designed to spring Philip Sheedy.
JUST over a year after Judge Matthews imposed his original sentence, solicitor Michael Staines got a call from the most senior official of the Dublin Circuit Court, county registrar Michael Quinlan.
Much to Michael Staines's bewilderment, the registrar asked him when he was going to put in an application to review Philip Sheedy's sentence which, he said, Judge Cyril Kelly was "awaiting". Michael Staines was puzzled because, although he had given some advice to Philip Sheedy's father, he had no involvement with the case itself. He asked Michael Quinlan what all of this was about. The reply was: "You don't want to know."
Two aspects of this approach were quite bizarre. In the first place the county registrar had no business calling up a solicitor and suggesting that his client apply for a review. In his 20 years of practice, Michael Staines had never received such a call. Michael Quinlan, for his part, admitted to the Department of Justice inquiry that "it would not be normal for me to initiate contact with a solicitor to make any application."
No less strange to Michael Staines was Mr Quinlan's suggestion that Judge Kelly was "awaiting" this application. After he got in touch with the Sheedy family and discovered that Philip Sheedy did want him to take the case, he checked its previous history and found that the original sentence had been handed down by Judge Matthews.
He knew, as he later told the Chief Justice, that "the only judge competent to hear an application to reinstate a review date was the actual sentencing judge (i.e., Judge Matthews)."
So how did Michael Quinlan come to be making this very strange call and how did Cyril Kelly come to be "awaiting" an application he was not entitled to hear? These two questions are the very heart of the Sheedy enigma. And neither of them has been answered with any clarity either by the official inquiries or by Hugh O'Flaherty's media interviews this week.
The bones of Mr O'Flaherty's explanations are by now familiar to most people. He met Philip Sheedy's sister and Ken Anderson, the son of family friends, while out for a walk. They gave him "an outline of the case". He suggested that it might be possible to relist the case so that "the Circuit Court could have another look at it". He then mentioned the Sheedy case to Michael Quinlan, merely, he claimed, in order to check his belief that such cases could be relisted. Whatever happened after that had nothing to do with him.
Michael Quinlan subsequently confirmed Hugh O'Flaherty's account of their meeting which, he said, lasted less than two minutes. The problem is that such a brief, almost off-hand encounter does not begin to explain either Michael Quinlan's strange call to Michael Staines or Cyril Kelly's expectation of an application to review Philip Sheedy's sentence.
There are, for a start, some patent contradictions in the accounts by Hugh O'Flaherty and Michael Quinlan of the fateful meeting. This week, for example, Hugh O'Flaherty told Today FM that such a meeting between the two men would be almost routine. He and Michael Quinlan, he said, "would meet almost every day or certainly every week, I would think."
Michael Quinlan, on the other hand, told the Department of Justice inquiry in relation to Hugh O'Flaherty that "the extent of my communication with him was limited in the extreme." Apart from this initial twominute meeting, "there was no other communication of any kind between myself and Mr Justice O'Flaherty."
Moreover, while both men told the Hamilton inquiry that Mr O'Flaherty's purpose at the meeting was merely to confirm his advice to the couple he met on the street, the Today FM interview puts a very different gloss on what took place. Mr O'Flaherty told Eamon Dunphy that in talking to Michael Quinlan, he was "suggesting a course of action to have a case come before the court". The almost casual query has now become a conscious plan to get Philip Sheedy's sentence reviewed again.
On this new account, Michael Quinlan's phone call to Michael Staines becomes rather more comprehensible. But the course of action he suggested does not. There was, as Hugh O'Flaherty acknowledged in his interview, a perfectly "feasible" way of trying to bring the case before the court again.
Philip Sheedy's lawyers could apply for an extension in the time allowed for an appeal and pursue the ordinary course of justice. Why Michael Quinlan immediately set in train a completely different and perhaps unprecedented legal manoeuvre is still a mystery.
How, for example, did he know, as he told Michael Staines, that Cyril Kelly was awaiting an application from Sheedy's lawyers? The most obvious explanation would be that after Hugh O'Flaherty had approached him, he in turn spoke to Cyril Kelly. But this he flatly denied in a letter to the Minister for Justice in April 1999: "I should point out that I did not at any time mention the case to Judge Kelly."
This is a crucial question because Cyril Kelly went on to release Philip Sheedy in a hearing that lasted only a few moments, included no submissions from any lawyer, and was conducted while the only State solicitor assigned to the court was out taking a phone call.
The moment Philip Sheedy was produced for the hearing, the judge said: "I have grave concerns in relation to his mental condition at the moment. OK. So I will suspend the balance of his sentence."
These concerns were based on a non-existent psychological report which he subsequently tried without success to have added to the file.
So how did Cyril Kelly come to deal with the case? On the one hand, Michael Quinlan told the Department of Justice inquiry that this was basically a matter of chance: "I would not have known that Judge Kelly would be sitting in that court on the day in question."
On the other, he had already told Michael Staines that Cyril Kelly was awaiting his application. How could he have known that if he did not even know that Cyril Kelly would be dealing with the case?
Neither of the official inquiries into the Sheedy affair managed to answer such basic questions as these. The former Chief Justice, in his report, stressed that it was neither possible nor proper for him to attempt to resolve "disputed questions of fact."
The Department of Justice acknowledged that "there are many questions as to what happened in this case to which we do not have answers at this time." Now that these unanswered questions have been exhumed, they cannot be buried a second time.
fotoole@irish-times.ie
