‘Government is passing the buck on my son’s confession’

THE mother of a drug addict who was wrongly charged with a double murder in 1997 yesterday said the Government was passing the buck by hiring a lawyer to investigate the case.

Sheila Lyons reiterated her calls for a public inquiry into how her son, Dean, made a false confession to the killings of elderly psychiatric patients Sylvia Shields and Mary Callinan in Grangegorman hospital in Dublin.

Justice Minster Michael McDowell announced on Tuesday he was appointing an independent lawyer to examine the garda files on the investigation, and would report back to the Dáil on the findings.

Mrs Lyons yesterday said she welcomed the move but asked: “Will we hear anything from this decision or is it going to be held behind closed doors and just put away again for five years?

“If the police department can’t make a decision on it themselves, and it’s going to get passed to somebody else, is it not just passing the buck to somebody else all the time?”

Mr Lyons, a heroin addict who was sleeping rough in the Grangegorman area, later apparently confessed to the murders using information which could only be known by his garda interrogators or the actual murderer.

Ms Lyons, who was in the garda station the day in 1997 when Lyons was arrested, said he was in a very distressed condition.

She said: “Oh God he was in a terrible state. Absolutely. A terrible state he was in. Absolutely in bits. He was sobbing like a child. He was somebody that was like coming out of somewhere after being locked up for a week.”

A month later another man admitted to the killings, but subsequently withdrew this admission.

The charges against Mr Lyons were dropped without explanation by the DPP a year later and he died in Manchester in September 2000.

The Garda Press Office published a newspaper apology on February 24 for distress caused to Mr Lyons’ family and relatives of the two victims.

Ms Lyons said: “We were very glad to get the public apology. But it hasn’t answered any of our questions, of how it came that Dean said what he said, of how he knew every detail that happened.”

Mr McDowell told the Dáil on Tuesday that he “decided in principle to refer the garda papers to outside counsel with a view to examining how Mr Lyons came to make that confession, and what lessons can be learned from that occurrence, in an effort to ensure that anything similar doesn’t occur in the future.”

The matter has been been consistently raised in the Dáil by local inner city Dublin TD Tony Gregory and Labour leader Pat Rabbitte, in whose constituency the Lyons family lives.

Mr McDowell told Mr Gregory yesterday he could not yet agree to a public inquiry for garda operational reasons because a fresh “cold case review” was being carried out on evidence of the case to see if any forensic links can be made to another known suspect.

“I don’t want to speculate on what I will be advised by independent counsel on this matter, but I do accept that it is a serious issue.”