A RETIRED GARDA Superintendent gave evidence in court today that he “looked after” hundreds of summonses while in the senior garda role and that he received almost daily requests about such matters, including from Garda Commissioners and elected TDs.

Retired Limerick Divisional Superintendent Sean Corcoran, with an address in Co Clare, was giving evidence in the trial of retired Superintendent Eamon O’Neill and four serving gardaí. All five accused deny charges they acted unlawfully in quashing pending or potential road traffic summonses for motorists.

Corcoran, cross examined by O’Neill’s barrister, senior counsel Felix McEnroy, was asked if it had been “unusual” for members of the public to contact him, “in relation to particular concerns that they might have had, in relation to summonses, or road traffic matters, or Garda matters, or whatever?”

Corcoran replied: “It was very usual, judge, in my time as a Superintendent.

“I’d say every second day, I got a phone-call from somebody, between Commissioners, all (Garda) ranks down along; members of the Dáil, their secretaries; TDs and councillors,” he said.

“When you are a ‘Super’ they all know where you are and they’d contact you. So, I would say I probably looked after a couple of hundred different summonses in my time.”

Read by McEnroy, Corcoran stated that when he was a Detective Inspector in 1992, he was in charge of “Operation Silo”, that targeted the activities of the IRA and other subversives.

Corcoran stated he placed O’Neill, then Garda O’Neill, into this special group of twenty gardaí that were involved in “searching subversives, properties and farms, and arresting and interrogating each property owner”.

He said O’Neill had been “highly dedicated in the pursuance of IRA weapons and explosives”.

“We had major successes in discovering IRA bunkers, weapons, safe houses training camps, and, as a result, the Gardai received really important information from our duty,” he said. 

Corcoran said he was promoted to the rank of Superintendent on the back of the success of Operation Silo.

He stated he later deployed Garda O’Neill to a “stolen car squad” of officers to respond to “a rampage of stolen cars over the city of Limerick, the majority of which were taken to Southill and burnt”.

Corcoran described O’Neill as one of the “most loyal and dedicated members” that he encountered in his forty years of service in An Garda Síochána.

He stated O’Neill, when a Detective Inspector based at Henry Street Garda station, had “assisted Detective Superintendent Jim Browne” in rooting out the notorious “Dundon McCarthy criminal gang” from Limerick.

The gang was behind a number of gangland murders in Limerick in the early 2000s, including the killings of innocent rugby player Shane Geoghean in 2008 and businessman Roy Collins in 2009.

Answering McEnroy, Corcoran denied any suggestion there may have been anything “unusual or unprecedented or covert” about him contacting Eamon O’Neill, when O’Neill was a Superintendent, to look into a road traffic matter on behalf of a neighbour who was detected allegedly driving without insurance.

Corcoran replied: “Not a bit judge. I knew Eamon from my time (in the force), and I had a phone number for him.”

Corcoran explained that the driver in question had been fully taxed, NCT and insured on a work van but that the insurance had not covered him in a car he was driving at the time he was stopped.

Earlier, the court heard that another of the accused, Garda Colin Geary, Ennis Garda Station, told investigating gardaí that he received texts and images of summonses from Supt O’Neill.

Garda Geary told gardaí in video interviews, that were shown in court, that he understood the messages to be instructions from Supt O’Neill to ask the prosecuting garda in the potential prosecution to see if they would use their discretion in relation to the summons and that the matter would be withdrawn or struck out.

“I did as instructed,” Geary told investigators from the Garda National Bureau of Criminal Investigation (GNBCI).

The prosecution case, led by senior counsel Carl Hanahoe, is that Supt O’Neill’s alleged “interference or involvement” in potential prosecutions is at the heart of its case.

The five accused, Eamon O’Neill, Garda Colin Geary, Garda Tom McGlinchey, Sergeant Anne Marie Hassett and Sergeant Michelle Leahy, deny a total of 39 counts between them of “engaging in conduct tending or intended to pervert eh course of justice”.

The trial continues tomorrow before a jury of eight men and four women at Limerick Circuit Court.