A TRAVELLER accused of abducting and raping a prostitute in December, 1994, told a jury he was ill in a Kildare house on the night of the alleged offence.
The 36 year old accused said he was arrested in Cork on January 1st, 1995, and gardai kicked at his cell door in an attempt to intimidate him into signing a false confession.
The accused man also claimed Sgt Patrick Tully, a member of the Rathfarnham rape investigation team, slipped a copy of a Sunday newspaper under his cell door.
A circle had been drawn in pencil around an article entitled: "What should we do with Travellers - Should we put them in Spike Island or Timbuktu?"
He told the Central Criminal Court that since his return from England in 1993, he had been accepted by most members of the settled community. He had been constantly harassed by gardai, including gardai from Rathfarnham, as he had campaigned for travellers' rights.
He also said he is writing a book about his experiences in order to tell his fellow members of the travelling community, "I am being accepted. You can be too by changing a little." He wanted to "send a message to his own people.
The accused man told the court the only explanation he was given in Cork's Mayfield Garda station for his arrest was that gardai from Portarlington, Co Laois, were investigating some matter.
He claimed he was in a Kildare house on the night of the alleged rape, December 29th-30th, 1994. The next day he decided to go to see his estranged wife and his children for the New Year but detoured and ended up in Cork.
He met a woman and had sexual intercourse with her before booking into a bed and breakfast on the morning of January 1st, 1995. That evening he went out to get food and was arrested.
He has pleaded not guilty to charges of abducting, raping and sexually assaulting the woman in the Wicklow Mountains, when she was working as a prostitute to feed her heroin addiction.
Before the accused began giving evidence, his counsel, Mr Blaise O'Carroll SC (with Mr Garnet Orange), said the defence was questioning whether the alleged rape had taken place.
The defence was also asking the jury to consider whether there was evidence to connect the accused man with such an offence and was further submitting that there was a Garda conspiracy to "frame" the accused. He said that as a member of the travelling community his client "feels a certain pressure coming from that".
In evidence, the man said he classed himself as an "Irish tinker". His parents and a brother were killed in a car crash when he was 13, so he had to go to live with an aunt.
He spent "a few weeks here and a few weeks there" in schools around the country but left school only able to read and write a little. He had been "self employed" collecting scrap, labouring on farms and selling goods at market.
He got married in 1982 and moved his family to England to stay with his brother. He did night classes there and learned to read and write well.
He met "gypsies" there and got involved in campaigning for travellers' rights by working for an off shoot of the Big Issue magazine. It often highlighted the "brutality inflicted on travellers, including women and children, by thee gardai", he said.
When his relationship with his wife broke down, he returned to a west Dublin halting site in September, 1993. He experienced "much intimidation and gun pointing" by gardai. A typewriter, hundreds of pages of his proposed book, a camera and photographs were stolen from his caravan by gardai, he claimed.
He said he and the other travellers got on well with the local settled community. But when he returned to Ireland he knew there would be some sort of reprisal from gardai. "I thought we had all grown up over the last 20 years," he said. It is very hard to stop telling truths," he said.
He described an incident where his pregnant common law wife was hospitalised after an attempt was made to demolish a halting site in Bray, Co Wicklow, in what he said was contravention of various High Court orders.
He claimed the head of the rape investigation team, Det Sgt James Costello, Sgt Tully and Garda Mary Walsh, all from Rathfarnham Garda station, were present at the incident and said he made a complaint to travellers' representatives and newspapers.
The trial before Mr Justice Moriarty and a jury continues.