Courts

Possible use of tracking device on car in which Gerard Hutch travelled to the North key issue in trial, claims defence

Deployment of electronic surveillance outside the State would have been illegal, court told

Members of the Garda Armed Support Unit outside the Criminal Courts of Justice on Tuesday. Photograph: Tom Honan for The Irish Times.

Alison O'Riordan
Wed Nov 2 2022 - 18:01

Gerard Hutch’s defence team have told his Special Criminal Court murder trial that it is “of great significance” whether gardaí deployed a tracker device on a jeep belonging to former Sinn Féin councillor Jonathan Dowdall and illegally used it while the vehicle was in Northern Ireland.

Gerard ‘The Monk’ Hutch (59), last of The Paddocks, Clontarf, Dublin 3, denies the murder of Kinahan Cartel member David Byrne (33) during a boxing weigh-in at the Regency Hotel on February 5th, 2016.

The Special Criminal Court has already viewed CCTV footage of what the State says is Gerard Hutch making two separate journeys to Northern Ireland with Jonathan Dowdall on February 20th and March 7th, 2016.

In his opening address, Sean Gillane SC, prosecuting, said it was the State’s case that Hutch had asked Dowdall to arrange a meeting with provisional republicans to mediate or resolve the Hutch-Kinahan feud due to the threats against the accused’s family and friends. Dowdall had driven Gerard Hutch to meet the republicans on February 20th, 2016, he said.

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The State also said in their opening speech that Dowdall drove Hutch north to a second meeting in Strabane in Co Tyrone on March 7th, 2016 and that their vehicle was the subject of surveillance.

On Wednesday, PSNI Detective Constable Laura McClelland told Maddie Grant BL, prosecuting, that she was tasked with obtaining CCTV from Maldron Hotel Belfast International Airport from March 7th, 2016 between 5.15pm and 6.16pm and that she received the requested footage on April 1st, 2016.

CCTV footage was previously shown to the court from the afternoon of March 7th, where a garda witness said Dowdall’s jeep is seen at the Maldron Hotel in Adergrove in Belfast at 5.35pm that evening and Gerard Hutch gets out of the vehicle. The garda witness said that Gerard Hutch goes to the counter, speaks to the receptionist and receives a wallet at 5.42pm. He pays for the parking ticket and goes out to the Land Cruiser. The jeep then drives off.

Inspired

Under cross-examination on Wednesday, defence counsel Brendan Grehan SC, for Hutch, put it to the witness that her statement did not tell him how she was inspired to conduct the CCTV enquiries. The witness said she was tasked on March 30th by her Detective Sergeant.

“Do I understand you were tasked at looking at various specific locations for very specific items for where a particular vehicle might be spotted?” asked Mr Grehan. The witness said she had.

Mr Grehan asked the detective if she could tell him who had requested the original CCTV footage. “I wouldn’t be privy to that, the only person who tasked me was Detective Sergeant Maxwell,” she said.

“So you don’t know why you were asked to do this, who had asked or why?” pressed Mr Grehan. “This was my tasking,” she replied.

“The only fruit so to speak was what you got from the Maldron Hotel?” he asked. The detective agreed with this.

“You are not privy as to how Det Sgt Maxwell came to ask you to do this?” asked Mr Grehan. The witness said she wasn’t.

When the witness stood down, Mr Grehan asked if he might be permitted to say a few words to the court.

Beginning his address to the three judges, the barrister said the court would have noted that the defence had been asking questions from various witnesses “some to a greater or lesser extent” trying to establish whether Jonathan Dowdall’s Toyota Land Cruiser was followed across the border into Northern Ireland, which the defence had got “some headway” on.

However, Mr Grehan said the defence had got “no headway” on whether a tracker had been used on the Land Cruiser belonging to Dowdall.

‘Of great significance’

“We say it is of great significance whether a tracker was deployed by gardaí to be used outside the State, that is illegal and in breach of the law,” he said. He said the prosecution had been relying on CCTV footage in particular from a BP service station in Newry and The Quays Shopping Centre in Newry on February 20th, 2016.

“We have a very great interest in how a specific inquiry came to be made within a very short time of what happened with this particular vehicle in those particular locations. We have had very little success with witnesses to date. We don’t get the person, we get the person behind the person,” he continued.

He said the person being tasked by someone to collect the CCTV is being called by the State but not “the person tasking them”. Mr Grehan said Hutch’s solicitor had been writing to the State since last June looking for this information “in terms of emails and notes” to reflect how it was that these enquiries came to be made.

“We haven’t got a lot,” he added. It may be the case, he said, that there “isn’t anything more” or that some people for their own reasons are not providing the information because they are maintaining a claim of privilege over whether a tracker was used or whether Garda personnel followed the Toyota Land Cruiser into the north.

In summary, the barrister said he was going to keep asking the questions to witnesses even if that means that the trial would not be “very truncated”.

Mr Grehan said it would be very important in relation to the tracker device deployed in Northern Ireland but of even greater importance would be whether a listening bug was deployed outside the State, which would raise itself in due course in the trial.

“If it does mean that we are going to have this back and forth finding out information on the hoof, we will do it that way. It would be an awful lot simpler if we knew where we stood and if this issue was addressed square on instead of a subterfuge, where we get a tiny bit of the picture,” he stressed.

‘Method to our madness’

Mr Grehan agreed with Ms Justice Tara Burns, presiding, that he was not making an application but merely setting out his stall or doing what he said the late Mr Justice Paul Carney referred to as “a whinge”. “There is a method to our madness,” he said.

The judge said these witnesses were in the book of evidence as they had collected the CCTV footage and that the defence were entitled to all the relevant information. She said Hutch’s solicitor had sought this information and that an enquiry had been made as far back as June.

In reply, Mr Gillane, prosecuting, said that issues are now being skilfully conflated and at a point convenient to Mr Grehan. He said he was told when he played the CCTV footage that he was on proof and it would never have occurred to him “in a million years” to “call the guy behind the guy”.

Mr Justice Burns said the reality is that an issue had ultimately arisen of what Mr Grehan has been canvassing in the last two days.

“We have had a lightning bolt from Mr Grehan today in relation to what might be at play. Ultimately there will be an argument in relation to this,” she said.

Mr Byrne, from Crumlin, was shot dead at the hotel in Whitehall, Dublin 9 after five men, three disguised as armed gardaí in tactical clothing and carrying AK-47 assault rifles, stormed the building during the attack, which was hosting a boxing weigh-in at the time.

The victim was shot by two of the tactical assailants and further rounds were delivered to his head and body. Mr Byrne died after suffering catastrophic injuries from six gunshots fired from a high-velocity weapon to the head, face, stomach, hand and legs.

Hutch’s two co-accused - Paul Murphy (59), of Cherry Avenue, Swords, Co Dublin and Jason Bonney (50), of Drumnigh Wood, Portmarnock, Dublin 13 have pleaded not guilty to participating in or contributing to the murder of David Byrne by providing access to motor vehicles on February 5th, 2016.

The trial continues on Thursday before Ms Justice Burns sitting with Judge Sarah Berkeley and Judge Grainne Malone.

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