Mark Nash: I was locked out of earlier parole bid

Serial killer Mark Nash claims the delay in charging him with the murders of two women in Grangegorman had “locked him out” from applying for parole as early as he could have, the Supreme Court has heard.

Nash, aged 43, was jailed for life last year for the murders of Mary Callinan, 61, and Sylvia Shiels, 59, in their home in Dublin, in March 1997. He had already been serving a life sentence imposed in 1998 for a double murder in Roscommon in August 1997 when Catherine Doyle and her husband Carl were brutally killed at their home in Castlerea.

He was charged in 2009 with the Grangegorman murders and later failed in a High Court attempt to stop that prosecution, claiming that because of the delay in charging him there was a real risk of an unfair trial.