At 2.35 in the morning on October 6th last year, the actor Sean McGinley drove through a red light at Mespil Road in Dublin. He was observed doing this by a splendid young garda named Laura Sheridan who followed him as far as Lansdowne Road.
She then stopped him. She found that he smelt of alcohol and his eyes were bloodshot. She arrested him and took him to Store Street Garda Station where was put under the statutory 20-minute observation period to ensure he consumed nothing.
He was then taken to the Lion Intoxilyser breath-test machine where he gave a sample to Garda Cliff Harding. He was found to have a blood-alcohol ratio of 49 micrograms per 100 millilitres of breath. The legal limit is 35 milligrams of alcohol. In other words, he was 40 per cent over the limit. Try spending 40 per cent more than you earn. Forty per cent is not a margin but a dimension.
Sean McGinley was in court last week, and what happened there was a triumph for the rule of lawyers, but not the rule of intended law. Moreover, it was a particular triumph of the peculiar legal culture of this country, which repeatedly exalts the "rights" of the accused over those of the entire community.
Under cross-examination, Garda Sheridan denied that she had written eight pages of notes in her notebook at Store Street Garda Station during the 20-minute period of observation. The accusation presumes that in a busy police station, every arresting officer is able to keep every arrested person under minute and unwavering personal scrutiny, meanwhile attending to absolutely no other duties.
Martin Dully, for the defendant, then argued that his client should have been under observation from the very moment he arrived in the station, not eight minutes after arriving. "He was therefore in unjustified detention for eight minutes." Eight minutes? Eight bloody minutes? Can this man be serious in presenting such an argument before the court, on a charge which is so very grave? Well, he can, actually - for we have repeatedly seen our courts turned into cats' cradles for lawyers, where abstruse and procedural lawyerly point has succeeded abstruse and procedural lawyerly point, so that no one outside the profession of law has the least understanding of what is going on. The result is a legal DNA molecule, a double helix of incomprehensibility which brings smiles to defending lawyers' faces, and looks of dumb, ox-like stupidity to ours.
However, in the McGinley case, Judge Mary Collins, rejected the Dully argument, declaring that she was satisfied that Garda Sheridan was attending to procedural matters. But in the diseased culture to which the profession of law has been reduced, it is more than possible that another judge might have ruled that the accused should have been under unbroken personal observation from the moment he entered the station. This is one of the busiest places in the entire Republic, where gardaí, of course, have nothing better than to pore fixedly over arrested persons, as if they were Dead Sea Scrolls.
But what happened next is too astounding for words. Judge Mary Collins ruled that just before the breath test was carried out, "an opinion should have been formed at that stage" whether or not Sean McGinley was under the influence of drink so as to be able to drive properly. It wasn't, so she therefore dismissed the case.
But an opinion had already been fully formed that he was drunk - back at Lansdowne Road, after he had gone through a red light, was stopped, reeked of alcohol and had red eyes. So the judge, in effect, was demanding that a further opinion should have been freshly formed about the accused's drunkenness at the very moment before he was breath-tested, and that the opinion gained at 2.35am was no longer valid about 40 minutes later.
Madam Judge, you may make sense of that; but I confess I cannot. Garda Sheridan caught and arrested a drunk driver, fair and square, found he was 40 per cent over the limit, processed the paperwork and brought the case to trial - no doubt at considerable cost to the State. But nonetheless, Sean McGinley has now walked free, to drive on our roads again.
So why on earth would members of An Garda Síochána bother enforcing the law? In their place, I wouldn't. Because once they do, they enter the Grand National of our legal system, where every single aspect of what they had done on the night of the arrest will be turned into a fiendish Beecher's Brook for them to cross in court. One stumble, they are down, and the accused walks free.
This is not justice in any meaningful sense. It is a parlour-game, played out to rules which no one outside the legal system understands. But we pay for this parlour game. We pay for the politicians to pass the laws, the gardaí to enforce them, and our courts to rule on the cases which result. The consequences of failure at any level are precisely what we've got: alone in western Europe, our roads deaths rise remorselessly.
So, is this actually an expression of our true national malaise? Are we afflicted with a moral fecklessness which absolves our political classes from meaningfully tackling the issue of gratuitous manslaughter? Indeed, was it a comparable ethical indolence which allowed this Republic to remain the operational base for Europe's most lethal terrorist group for an entire generation? This is a melancholy thought indeed - but maybe our appalling road-death statistics actually provide the most telling insight into the Irish national character.