Colm Murphy was further remanded until next October by the Special Criminal Court today while he awaits the outcome of his legal challenge to a retrial on a conspiracy charge connected with the 1998 Real IRA bombing in Omagh in which 29 people, including a woman pregnant with twins, died.
His solicitor Mr Michael Finucane told the court that the Supreme Court has yet to hear an appeal against an earlier High Court decision which refused an application to halt the retrial.
Murphy (aged 54), a building contractor and publican who is a native of Co Armagh but with an address at Jordan's Corner, Ravensdale, Co Louth, was freed on bail in 2005 after the Court of Criminal Appeal quashed his conviction for conspiracy offences connected with the Real IRA bombing which killed 29 people, including a woman pregnant with twins, and injured more than 300 people.
Murphy was jailed for 14 years by the Special Criminal Court in January 2002 for his alleged role in the Omagh bomb. He was the first person to be convicted in either the Republic or the North in connection with the Real IRA bombing, the worst terrorist atrocity in the history of the thirty years of the northern troubles.
But in January 2005 the Court of Criminal Appeal overturned the conviction and ordered a retrial after finding that the court of trial had failed to give proper regard to altered garda interview notes and that there had been "an invasion of the presumption of innocence'' in the judgment on Murphy.
During a 25-day trial in 2001 and 2002, Murphy had pleaded not guilty to conspiring in Dundalk with another person not before the court to cause an explosion in the State or elsewhere between August 13 and 16, 1998.
The court remanded Murphy on continuing bail until October when his case will be mentioned again.
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