A protester who claims he was hit on the arm with a baton during last year's May Day Reclaim the Streets event yesterday accepted video footage played to a courtroom did not show the garda striking him.
Mr Brian Hayden, a film student, insisted however that the incident occurred before the recording of the excerpt of tape shown to the court.
Garda Keith Goff, stationed at Mountjoy Garda station in Dublin, denies assaulting Mr Hayden, who alleges he received four or five blows from a baton used by the officer during the anti-globalisation protest at Dame Street in Dublin on May 6th last year.
Dublin District Court heard he was part of a group of protesters moving along the street when he saw two or three gardaí batoning a person crouched in a foetal position on the ground. As he went forward and called on them to stop, a garda struck at him slightly, hitting the front of his neck, near his Adam's apple. There was a lot of commotion and he noticed "people running everywhere" and people again being hit with batons. He was again shouting stop and moving forward when two officers, including Garda Goff, came at him and hit him on the upper left arm with their batons.
A short time later, he was hit on the head by another unidentified garda and sustained a serious injury, for which he made a separate complaint to the Garda Complaints Board.
The court heard that he identified Garda Goff from video footage, but in his initial statement mistakenly identified him as the garda who had hit him on the neck.
It was not until nearly a year later, when shown additional video evidence, including some filmed from the Garda helicopter, that he withdrew part of his statement, saying he was "98 per cent sure" that it was Garda Goff who had struck him on the neck. The court heard yesterday that the defence had employed a specialist company to slow down the tape which the prosecution was relying on.
Before he was shown this version, Mr Hayden accepted that if this section of the tape did not show him being struck by Garda Goff that he would be "man enough" to admit that had not occurred.
The tape showed Garda Goff striking out and making contact with a friend of Mr Hayden's, but Mr Hayden agreed the tape did not show the officer making contact with him.
He insisted he had been struck before the film segment shown. "The incident I was referring to was not that incident. The time I was struck was not actually shown, it occurred just before I was being pulled back by [another] garda in the short shirt sleeves." The trial continues.