Regency trial: How CCTV was the undoing of Bonney and Murphy 

Jason Bonney, 52, of Drumnigh Wood, Portmarnock, Dublin 13, has been jailed for eight-and-a-half years. Picture: Collins Courts

For 52 days, Jason Bonney and Paul Murphy sat beside Gerard Hutch as the Regency trial unfolded.

Each day they would walk into court through the main doors, while Mr Hutch would come in a side door. The odd time, they would chat, share a joke. But it was seldom that many words were exchanged.

They sat through the hours upon hours of the tapes of Mr Hutch’s quite one-sided conversation with former Sinn Féin councillor Jonathan Dowdall on their trip up North to meet republicans. Neither Bonney nor Murphy’s name were mentioned there.

They sat through the eight excruciating days of Dowdall’s cross-examination by Brendan Grehan SC, for Mr Hutch. They did not come up there either.

The main thrust of the case before the Special Criminal Court, and certainly a majority of court time, was spent on the State’s attempts to prove Gerard Hutch killed David Byrne.

But what the case against ‘The Monk’ hinged on ultimately would prove too flimsy given how heavily it relied on what Dowdall had to say and his evisceration in the witness box.

What the State had against Bonney and Murphy proved far more compelling, and it is what led to the pair being sentenced on Friday to eight-and-a-half years and nine years, respectively, in prison.

It was the State’s case that Bonney, 52, of Drumnigh Wood, Portmarnock, Dublin 13, and Murphy, 62, of Cherry Avenue, Swords, Co Dublin, drove two of six getaway cars which formed a convoy that drove from Donnycarney Church to St Vincent’s GAA Club on February 5, 2016.

Paul Murphy has been sentenced to nine years. File picture: Collins Courts

There they waited, while a meticulously planned, brutal operation kicked into gear at the nearby Regency Hotel.

The boxing weigh-in for the Clash of the Clans event was in full swing when armed raiders stormed the Regency Hotel. Amid the panic that ensued, Kinahan cartel associate David Byrne was gunned down by the hitman, suffering catastrophic, fatal injuries.

In and out in six minutes, the six-man team fled the hotel grounds in a white van and CCTV captured them running down a laneway to where six cars were parked waiting to drive them away.

And it was CCTV, as well as their own utterances to gardaí, that would go some way towards the undoing of Jason Bonney and Paul Murphy in this case.

In the early stages of the trial, it became clear the length and breadth of evidence-gathering undertaken by the gardaí in the wake of the Regency shooting. Pieced together from CCTV across many parts of North Dublin, the State presented what it claimed was Bonney and Murphy driving their vehicles on the day of the Regency murder at various junctures.

Those vehicles visited the “centre of operations” — Buckingham Village. They would later join the convoy of vehicles that went to St Vincent’s before leaving the scene with the other vehicles simultaneously.

Claims from Murphy about his taxi being cloned or having fares at the time were rejected. As were Bonney’s claims about his deceased father driving his vehicle.

The court was also satisfied the pair had knowledge of the Hutch criminal organisation which carried out the Regency attack.

By way of mitigation, both legal teams said neither were on the gardaí’s radar before. Murphy’s legal team argued his offending was at the lower end of offences in this case.

But the court disagreed. At sentencing, Ms Justice Tara Burns said while neither of them may have known exactly what was planned, they knew a “serious criminal event” was in the works and gave “intentional” assistance to it.

Given the crime they helped to facilitate was murder, it very much fell in the “serious end” of things.

On the day Mr Hutch was acquitted, Bonney and Murphy were found guilty. As Hutch left the court through the front door and walked free to an unprecedented media frenzy, the other pair were quietly led out the side door on the way to prison, where they will now serve considerable jail time.

They join Jonathan Dowdall and his father Patrick in being the only men convicted in relation to the Regency attack that, in the view of the Special Criminal Court, was organised by the Hutch criminal organisation. 

More than seven years on, no one has been convicted of David Byrne’s murder.