A man giving evidence against his father in a murder trial said his father threatened to kill his brother if he "grassed him up", a jury in the Central Criminal Court was told yesterday. In cross-examination, Scott Delaney said when he and his father were in prison together, his father threatened to murder Scott's brother if he "opened his mouth".
"He said if I opened my mouth, the next time he sees him, he'd kill my brother. He said he'd kill Robert when he got out, when he gets his hands on him," Delaney said. Mr Joseph Delaney (54), formerly of La Rochelle, Naas, Co Kildare, has pleaded not guilty to the murder of Mr Mark Dwyer (23) on or about December 14th 1996. He has also pleaded not guilty to falsely imprisoning Mr Dwyer and detaining him against his will at Foster Terrace, Ballybough, Dublin, on December 14th, 1996.
Scott Delaney, who is serving a life sentence for the murder of Mr Dwyer, said his father reassured him "when we were in prison that Mark wasn't getting out of the house alive that night". His father believed Mr Dwyer had made an attempt on his life in the previous few weeks, he said.
Mr Blaise O'Carroll SC, defending, suggested that he had "come to an arrangement with `Mr X' that was not an agreement merely to abduct Mark Dwyer for questioning and a few digs in the way you describe, but the agreement was to have him killed".
"What would I want to kill him for?" he replied. Referring to his father, he said: "He killed him over his ecstasy. That's what it comes down to. I had no reason to kill him."
Delaney had said two of the abductors he employed to kidnap Mr Dwyer had complained after overhearing him telling his father not to kill him. Mr O'Carroll asked Delaney why the two men had complained if the arrangement was only to have him abducted. "They reckoned I was going to grass them up," Delaney said. "One of them was OK, he was only a young fellow, but the other two of them were savages." They were "head cases", he said, "mad as what my old fellow was".
He had previously not mentioned the names of the gang members in statements to gardai because he did not want to be shot, but he had now named the men because he said "the joke was over" and he did not want to serve a life sentence for a murder he did not do.
"When I got Mark down to the house, that was my job done," he said. "When he didn't get the information he wanted out of him, he destroyed him with a bar. My da destroyed Mark in the house that night."
His father told him he would "take the rap" for him if he was convicted at his trial for the murder of Mr Dwyer. Asked what he meant by that, Delaney said it meant his father would "tell the truth about it, that he'd put his hand up and say the truth. When I got life, he didn't want to know."
The prosecution alleges that Mr Dwyer was shot dead after being tortured for a number of hours in a revenge killing, after 40,000 ecstasy tablets went missing believed to have been part of a drugs haul organised by the accused.
The case before Mr Justice Quirke resumes on Monday.[