A CAVAN farmer, who admitted forging documentation to obtain British passports, had his 12-month prison sentence suspended in a Dublin court yesterday.
Judge Pat McCartan said Edward Clail (57), of Rathcorrick, had lived under the threat of a prison sentence for more than two years as a result of an inexplicable delay in his appeal hearing coming to court.
"My view, having regard to a number of High Court decisions dealing with undue delay, is that it would be fundamentally unfair now to put you in prison even though the District Court believed more than two years ago you richly deserved it.
Clail's counsel, Mr Damian Colgan, told the Circuit Court his client was abandoning his appeal against conviction and was only challenging the severity of the sentence.
The case was an appeal from the District Court which heard Clail had been arrested in a pub after being handed two passports by a British embassy employee, Mr Brian O'Driscoll OBE. The court was told Mr O'Driscoll received the OBE because he had been chauffeur to the British Ambassador, Sir Christopher Ewart-Biggs, and had narrowly escaped death on the day the ambassador was assassinated at Murphystown Road, Sandyford, Co Dublin, in 1976 by a bomb planted by the Provisional IRA.
Yesterday Det Supt Ted Murphy said Clail had befriended Mr O'Driscoll and given him application forms which he said were for passports for his friends.
However, Garda inquiries revealed the passports related to non-existent people.
Judge McCartan suspended the prison sentence for two years and told Clail that if, in that time, the court heard of his associating with known criminals he would be sent to prison.