Former Dublin assistant county manager Mr George Redmond has lost his High Court bid to prevent his trial on corruption charges from proceeding at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court.
Mr Redmond may appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court. The High Court yesterday put a stay on its decision for 21 days in the event of such an appeal. The stay will continue once notice of appeal is lodged.
Lawyers for Mr Redmond (78) had argued it would not be possible for him to be tried at this time by an impartial and unbiased jury because of the very extensive media coverage of his affairs.
In his reserved judgment yesterday, Mr Justice Kearns said that while there had been adverse publicity in the case, he was not satisfied Mr Redmond had not established that this would, as a matter of probability, lead to a real risk of an unavoidably unfair trial.
To the extent that there may be some risk, the judge believed that could be avoided or overcome by appropriate warnings and directions from the trial judge, both before a jury was empanelled and during the trial itself. He did not believe any adverse publicity was so prejudicial as to preclude the trial judge from pursuing that option.
Mr Justice Kearns said any further publication of salacious or prejudicial material, either about the impending trial or about Mr Redmond, between now and the date of the trial would leave open to Mr Redmond the possibility of making a further application for postponement or prohibition.
The judge ruled Mr Redmond should pay the costs of the case to date, unofficially estimated at well in excess of €100,000.
In his judgment, Mr Justice Kearns said: "While acknowledging that an individual's right to a fair trial is a superior right to that of the community to prosecute, the importance of the community's right must not be devalued or given mere lip service. The efficacy of a society's system of justice involves giving due recognition to both rights and not just the former.
"This is not to say that one right may be traded off in some way against the other or that an accused's right to a fair trial be balanced detrimentally against the community's right to have alleged crimes prosecuted."
He said it was beyond question that there had been a considerable amount of adverse media publicity about Mr Redmond. It was conceded, however, on behalf of Mr Redmond, that it would be possible for the trial judge, before empanelling any jury, to warn that no person should serve who, because of the publicity, felt they could not deal fairly or in an unbiased way with the case, he said.