When Danny McNamee stood on the steps of the Royal Courts of Justice yesterday and raised his hands in triumph at beating the British judicial system, the words of the judges who had quashed his conviction for conspiracy to cause explosions must have been ringing in his ears.
The "grudging" ruling by three senior judges that his conviction was unsafe was accompanied by a conclusion that it did not follow that Mr McNamee, from Crossmaglen, Co Armagh, was innocent of the charge brought against him or that he had spent 11 years in prison "for a crime which it had been found that he did not commit".
The appeal was successful because of a powerful combination of "massive" and deliberate non-disclosure of evidence prior to Mr McNamee's trial in 1987, which pointed to a much more likely candidate for the Hyde Park bombing - that of Dessie Ellis, a convicted IRA terrorist.
When the non-disclosure issue was joined with the considerable doubt raised by fingerprint experts, Lord Justice Swinton Thomas, sitting with Mr Justice Garland and Mr Justice Longmore, ruled that it was "impossible to know what evidence a jury would be likely to accept and what evidence they would be likely to reject".
There had "undoubtedly" been a failure to disclose fresh evidence but the court concluded that the impact of that evidence on the case was not conclusive.
The Crown had presented "a very strong case that the appellant was indeed a conspirator to cause explosions and it may very well be that, as a matter of probability, a jury would still have found him guilty if they had the material that we had".
However, the ruling went on to say that the impact of fresh evidence "is such as to render the verdict of the jury unsafe because a reasonable tribunal of fact might properly resolve the conflict in favour of the appellant and so be left with a reasonable doubt as to his guilt".
Before his trial, Mr McNamee was preparing to contest his case on charges of conspiring to cause explosions in the United Kingdom between 1983 and 1984. However, 10 days before the trial the prosecution applied to the court to include evidence about the Hyde Park bomb.
The bombing had outraged the British public, who were horrified by the carnage of dead soldiers and dead horses strewn across the road in an appalling act of violence. Mr McNamee was soon to find himself burned into the British psyche as the "master bomb-maker" capable of indiscriminate murder.
Mr McNamee consistently maintained that through his work with circuit boards at Kimbles Manufacturing in Dundalk, Co Louth, his fingerprints were found on a piece of grey masking tape on an IRA detonating device in Salcey Forest, Northamptonshire, in 1984.
Another fingerprint was found on red masking tape at another IRA arms dump found in Pangbourne, Berkshire, in 1983, and a third fingerprint, which he denied was his, was found on a Duracell battery which was part of an unexploded bomb found in London in 1983.
The association was "innocent," because he did not know that the workshop at Kimbles was producing terrorist devices. However, the jury accepted the inference that the discovery of his fingerprints meant he was a master bomb-maker and he was convicted and sentenced to 25 years. It was not until the extradition of Dessie Ellis from Ireland to Britain in 1991 that his legal team uncovered fresh evidence.
Mr Ellis was charged with conspiracy to cause explosions, which included evidence relating to all the IRA explosions in the UK between 1982 and 1984 with the exception of Hyde Park. He was acquitted, but the evidence produced at his trial, some of which had been gathered four years before Mr McNamee's arrest, included three of his fingerprints, which were found inside a tin box at Pangbourne.
Furthermore, circuit boards found in his possession in Dublin in 1981 were identical in design to the circuit board found in Salcey Forest. Importantly for Mr McNamee, it had been said at his trial that there really was no dispute that the person who had manufactured the Salcey Forest circuit board was the same person who had manufactured the circuit board used in the Hyde Park bomb.
During Mr McNamee's appeal, Mr Michael Mansfield QC insisted that the fingerprint on the Duracell battery could not be shown to be Mr McNamee's. The non-disclosure of the Ellis information to the defence was "a serious irregularity".