JEMIMA BURKE, A sister of teacher Enoch Burke, has had a District Court conviction for a public order offence quashed by the High Court.

Burke (30), a management consultant in professional services and a UCG graduate in journalism, was convicted of the offence by Judge Vincent Deane at Ballina District Court, Co Mayo on 20 June 2024.  

It came after Burke attended an inquest in Swinford, Co Mayo that same day, which she told a previous court hearing concerned the death of a sepsis patient at Mayo University Hospital (MUH).

She said the man spent 42 hours on a trolley, then went missing while in hospital care, and was later found dead in a river in Castlebar.

She said during the inquest lunch break, while outside on the public street, she used her phone to film the coroner and several MUH staff. A Garda arrested her, confiscated her phone and brought her to Ballina Garda Station, where she was detained in a cell for more than two hours.

She was then charged with two public order offences relating to a breach of the peace. When she appeared before Judge Deane that evening, she refused to sign a bail bond.

The case was heard immediately. Judge Deane convicted her of one of the public order offences, under Section 6 of the Public Order Act, with the other taken into consideration, and fined her €350.

Burke sought a review of her case last November after she alleged that her Constitutional rights were breached when she was arrested, charged, and convicted of a public order offence within a matter of hours.

She argued that she had been the victim of a “serious” miscarriage of justice in that there was “excessive haste” in hearing the original case, and that she received no disclosure and had no legal representation at her trial.

She said she had been detained in a cell for two hours and that 55 minutes after leaving the cell, she was on trial in the court.

In May, the High Court heard that the State would not oppose quashing the conviction against Burke, but it argued that the matter should still be sent back to the District Court for a new hearing.

In a written judgement today, Ms Justice Sara Phelan said that Burke was entitled to choose not to enter into a bail bond

“In preferring to not remand her in custody, and thereby conducting the trial on the same day on which the offence allegedly occurred, it is clear that the District Court Judge fell into error,” she said. 

“It seems to this Court that the actions of the District Court Judge were such as to deprive the applicant of her constitutional right to a fair trial and, that being so, the District Court ought not to have embarked on the hearing on 20 June 2024.”

The judge said while the District Court had jurisdiction to hear the case, it did not have jurisdiction “to embark on a peremptory hearing” and therefore, the court acted “in excess of jurisdiction from the outset”. 

Ms Justice Phelan said she was not prepared to return the matter to the District Court for a new hearing “in circumstances where the applicant has endured enough and the prosecution cannot be acquitted of all the blame for some, at least, of what went wrong at the trial.” 

She also ruled that Burke was not entitled to an award of compensatory damages.

She quashed Burke’s conviction and made an order prohibiting any further prosecution of Burke in the District Court. 

With reporting from Paul Neilan