The family of a man wrongly accused of the Grangegorman murders in 1989 is to receive an official public apology from the Garda Síochána.
Adverts will be taken out in the press in the coming weeks apologising for the charging of Dean Lyons with the murder of two women at an accommodation unit at St Brendan's psychiatric hospital in north Dublin, according to a report in the Irish Daily Starthis morning.
Mr Lyons, an "educationally slow" drug addict, was arrested in 1997 and charged with the double murder after confessing to the savage killing of Sylvia Shields (59) and Mary Callinan (61) in 1997.
Suspicions that Mr Lyons was coached in confessing to the murders were aroused when it emerged that detectives had also obtained a confession from another man, Mark Nash.
Nash was later convicted of a vicious double murder in Co Roscommon that happened five months after the Grangegorman killings.
Nash was convicted in October 1998 of the murder of Carl Doyle (29) and his wife, Catherine (28), in Ballintober, Castlerea. He also savagely beat his girlfriend, Ms Sarah Doyle. Ms Doyle, the murdered man's sister, was left for dead and was the State's chief witness at the murder trial.
While in custody in 1997, Nash admitted to the Grangegorman murders but Mr Lyons was held in custody for nine months despite the doubt over the reliability of his confession emerging several months prior to his release.
There has been much public condemnation of the Garda for failing to explain why Mr Lyons was kept in custody for so long and why Nash has never been charged with the Grangegorman murders.
The families of the two victims were outraged late last year when the Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, ruled out a public inquiry into the Garda investigation.
However, the Lyons family and their legal representatives are close to finalising discussions on an apology, a Garda spokesman confirmed.
"Developments can be expected in the near future," he told ireland.combut declined to comment on the Starreport, which said the apology would be made public through newspaper notices.
Nash has refused to give evidence at the inquest into the two women's murder. Post-mortem results showed both died from multiple stab wounds in what the chief investigating officer described at the time as a "particularly gruesome" attack by an apparently disturbed person.