Pair freed in leaked report probe

A journalist and a detective sergeant questioned by gardaí over the leak of an official report highly critical of the force were tonight released without charge.

Sunday Tribune crime correspondent Mick McCaffrey was named in the Dáil as the reporter being questioned by the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation (NBCI).

Gardaí said a file on the case was being prepared and would be forwarded to the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Mr McCaffrey was working for the Dublin-based Evening Herald last August when the newspaper ran a story claiming to reveal excerpts from a then-unpublished report into a homeless drug addict’s false confessions to a double murder.

A Commission of Investigation inquiry found that detectives in the case had inappropriately questioned Dean Lyons, while records of the interviews were potentially misleading and may have led to a miscarriage of justice.

Mr Lyons was charged with the murder of Sylvia Sheils (aged 59) and Mary Callinan (aged 61), who were stabbed to death in their beds in March 1997 in sheltered accommodation run by St Brendan’s psychiatric hospital in Grangegorman, Dublin.

The charges were dropped seven months later and he died in England afterwards. Gardaí issued an unprecedented apology to his family for charging an innocent man.

It is understood Mr McCaffrey had been interviewed by gardaí a number of times before the arrest, which has sparked fresh controversy over planned privacy laws that opponents say will frustrate investigative journalism.

At the time of The Evening Herald's report, the Department of Justice issued a warning to journalists that they could be breaking the law if they disclosed the contents of a Commission of Investigation inquiry.

Under the legislation, an individual can be jailed for up to five years or fined up to €300,000 for revealing the contents of an investigation before the official publication of its final report.

Mr McCaffrey and the detective sergeant were questioned under section four of the Criminal Justice Act and can be held for up to 24 hours.

Fine Gael’s Jim O’Keeffe demanded Minister for Justice Michael McDowell make a statement on the arrests during a debate in the Dáil today.

The opposition party’s justice spokesman linked the Garda investigation to Government-proposed privacy laws, which critics believe will undermine the media’s ability to expose information in the public interest.

“I want to know if that (Privacy) bill is going to be withdrawn, a bill that is designed to stifle investigative journalism, and I also want to know whether the master ministerial leaker himself, Michael McDowell, will make a statement in relation to the arrest of this journalist who apparently got a leaked report and published it in his paper,” Mr O’Keeffe said.

In the report into the Lyons case, the commission’s sole member, Mr George Birmingham SC, described the decision of the original investigation team to recommend a murder charge and an additional charge related to the second death as “difficult to understand and even harder to justify”.

The NUJ branded the arrest of Mr McCaffrey a disturbing development in Irish society.

“It strikes me as being extremely heavy handed,” said Seamus Dooley, Irish secretary of the NUJ.

“I do understand that the George Birmingham report contained inconvenient truths and publication of inconvenient truths is the function of journalism and they are always embarrassing to politicians.

“It’s hard not to believe that the purpose of this legislation and the purpose of the arrest, and the manner in which it was carried out, is to send a signal to journalists, particularly coming up to an election that: ’By God, we’ll leak. By God, we’ll spin, but we’ll do it our way.'"

Mr Dooley said it was ironic that a journalist was facing five years in prison at a time when the Government was attempting to manipulate the news agenda ahead of the general election, expected in May.

“Mr McDowell and his colleagues do not have a problem with leaks. That’s very obvious, but what they want is selective leaking, leaking on their terms,” he said.

“What this is about is an attempt to reign in an investigative journalist.”