Mother still waiting for justice a decade after son was killed on bike
The family of Shane O’Farrell who was killed in a hit and run in Co Monaghan on August 2, 2011. The full circumstances leading to the fatal accident remain unresolved.
ON August 2, Shane O’Farrell will be dead 10 years. He was on the cusp of completing his education and starting a new phase of his young life when he was killed by a hit-and-run driver outside Carrickmacross in Monaghan.
A tenth anniversary of this nature is difficult on any family, but when the full circumstances leading to the fatal accident remain unresolved, the pain is inevitably more acute.
Shane’s mother Lucia is adamant she will not rest until her son gets, as she sees it, justice.
The case has dragged on for nearly a decade with information emerging in dribs and drabs at various points, more often than not as a result of Lucia’s tireless quest. It was raised in the Dáil on Thursday and elicited a very curious response from Justice Minister Heather Humphreys.
Shane was 22 when his bicycle was in a collision with a car driven by Zigimantas Gridziuska.
This man had a long record of criminality over the previous two years and was on bail at the time of the offence.
He also had broken bail conditions a number of times without any sanction over the previous year and had been sentenced to a prison term which he never served.
The O’Farrells contend that, had the law taken its course, he would not have been at liberty at the time of Shane’s death. His family believe that the full truth of the circumstances are required to be aired in order to maintain confidence in the criminal justice system.
In June 2018, both houses of the Oireachtas passed resolutions calling for a public inquiry into the case. In February 2019, the then justice minister, Charlie Flanagan, announced a scoping inquiry to examine whether a full commission of investigation is warranted. Retired judge Gerard Haughton agreed to conduct the inquiry.
Scoping inquiries tend to be short affairs, rarely enduring for more than a matter of months. Usually what is required is an examination of all the paperwork associated with a case and a judgement call on whether the facts as assembled demand a full commission of investigation.
Mr Haughton consulted the O’Farrell family and drew up terms of reference. Those terms were not acceptable to the department. Their decision to narrow the terms was apparently based on the outcome of a successful legal challenge taken by another former justice minister, Alan Shatter, against a previous scoping inquiry in 2014, conducted by senior counsel Seán Guerin, into allegations of malpractice by Maurice McCabe.
The department’s position was curious as Mr Haughton was aware of the previous case and, having served as a judge, is well versed in the law. He did accept the changes asked for by the department and drove on.
The family were not pleased and initially reserved their position, but then agreed to cooperate.
Mr Haughton published an interim report on November 2019, setting out the establishment of his inquiry and initial soundings.
He concluded: “A very great amount of work has been done by the family to make my task easier and I am extremely grateful to them for that. They also deserve great praise for their dedication and persistence in the matter.
I have made it clear that I will not restrict or limit the family in their submissions to me or in the nature and extent of the documentation they wish to furnish to me in this scoping exercise.
“I hope that I do have their collective input and participation as without it this exercise will be greatly diminished and limited.
“This exercise will be limited to perusing documents and responses to enquiries arising therefrom and, I trust consultation with the O’Farrell family. With the information currently available to me from my investigations to date and as a consequence of my meetings with the family, I anticipate being in a position to conclude this matter within the next six months.”
Now, 18 months later, there is still no end in sight into what is a preliminary inquiry.
There is no suggestion that any delay is the fault of Mr Haughton, but his work is dependent on swift and full cooperation from others.
On Thursday, when Sinn Féin spokesperson on justice Martin Kenny raised the case in the Dáil with the minister for justice, she replied that Mr Haughton was awaiting replies from the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission (Gsoc) and the family.
Gsoc conducted its own investigation of the case which the family believes was flawed. Ms Humphreys added that she is hoping that the Haughton report will issue “shortly”.
Mr Kenny replied: “The question to be answered here is how long is ‘shortly’. The family have been waiting more than a year. We expected that the report would be completed in May last year. The scoping exercise will decide whether there needs to be a further inquiry. The Houses of the Oireachtas democratically voted on that.”
The minister then stated: “We were in touch with Mr Haughton last week. I understand that he is waiting on the family to revert to him with some answers.”
The reply infers that the family is the cause of the delay. This is completely erroneous and, by accident or design, deflects from the reality that another state body, Gsoc, is holding things up.
THE Guerin scoping inquiry, which reported in six weeks in 2014, noted that it had issues over the cooperation of Gsoc. But instead of waiting on the full replies for which he asked, Seán Guerin just went ahead and published. There may well be a good reason why Mr Haughton isn’t doing the same, but scoping has never taken this long before.
The Commission of Investigation Act was set up to examine “issues of urgent public importance”.
In the O’Farrell case, we are still at a preliminary stage three years on from when both houses of the Oireachtas voted on a full inquiry and nearly 10 years since the accident that should never have happened.
A cynic might suggest that in issues like this, the State and its organs define “urgency” in an entirely subjective manner.
The experience of the O’Farrell family is not unusual.
Whenever a citizen — or those representing a deceased citizen — attempts to establish whether the State’s agents acted negligently or improperly, the response is to treat the injured or bereaved parties as opponents rather than citizens entitled to answers.
This is the repeated experience of those who have pursued cases involving medical negligence, but it applies right across the State’s bodies.
In such a milieu, delay and prevarication are weapons of choice. In the case at issue here, it is unclear what the delay is, but it certainly appears as if the urgency that should attach is nowhere to be seen.
