AN unemployed man who was being paid £200 a week to store £118,000 worth of cannabis resin has been remanded on bail for sentence by Dublin Circuit Criminal Court on July 28th next.
Judge Cyril Kelly said that until he read the papers in the case at the weekend he had not appreciated fully the extent of a breakdown suffered by Gerard Dornan in 1995. He noted that Dornan had been treated at the James Connolly Memorial Hospital and was still under the care of his doctor. "I want to know the nature and extent of the problem and the treatment before I proceed to sentence. The court will need a psychiatric report and one from his general practitioner to deal with the matter", the judge said.
Dornan (32), of Meadow Copse, Dublin, was in "dire financial straits" when approached in a bar in Capel Street early last year by a person called "Paul", who knew of his problems and offered him £200 a week "easy money" to store the cannabis. He reluctantly agreed to this after a third phone call from "Paul", who delivered three lots of cannabis to him in three weeks.
The first consignment consisted of 30 slabs of cannabis, the second 42, while the third comprised the 48 bars discovered in the Garda raid on his home on February 2nd, 1996.
Dornan told gardai he was paid £400 and was due to get his next £200 just days after the Garda raid. His wife knew nothing about the cannabis until his arrest.
When Dornan pleaded guilty last week to unlawful possession of the cannabis for supply, his defence counsel, Mr Eamonn Leahy, said his client had suffered "something akin to a nervous breakdown" in 1995.
This was a result of stress from working very long hours as a night doorman in a club after working bring the day as an assistant manager in the meat division of a large supermarket. The breakdown led to him leaving his job, but redundancy money he expected did not materialise and he was left wondering how to provide for his wife and family of four.
Det Garda Gerard Lawless told Mr Patrick Marrinan, prosecuting, that 48 slabs of cannabis were found in a 10 litre tub behind a shed in Dornan's back garden. It weighed 11.87 kilograms and had street value of £118,000. Dornan had no previous convictions.
Mr Leahy pleaded for the case to be treated as an exceptional one. He said that Dornan had not been motivated by great riches, but had simply decided wrongly to hold on to the cannabis to save his family home. He accepted that he had done wrong and had brought shame on his family.