A man who made threats to kill a Dublin city councillor has been jailed for 13 months.<\/p>\n
On the night of May 15th, 2024, Jamie Moonen of Mountjoy Square, Dublin 1, showed up at the offices of Malachy Steenson, the Independent Dublin city councillor and made threats to kill Mr Steenson.<\/p>\n
Garda<\/a> Darragh O\u2019Connor told Dublin Circuit Criminal Court<\/a> that a short time before this, Moonen (30) had approached a Garda patrol car on the North Circular Road and began to verbally abuse a Garda member.<\/p>\n He told the garda \u201cyou\u2019re a f*****\u2019 prick and you do nothing for the public\u201d and then said he was going to go and kill Mr Steenson, who was campaigning in the local and European elections.<\/p>\n Garda O\u2019Connor said the force believed the threat to be credible and went to Mr Steenson\u2019s offices. They met Moonen, who again became verbally abusive.<\/p>\n When two male relatives of Mr Steenson stepped outside, Moonen became very aggressive and repeated his threat to kill the now 62-year-old politician. Garda\u00ed arrested the defendant and he told them he had had a few drinks and saw lots of Mr Steenson\u2019s political posters in the area.<\/p>\n He said he got angry and he wanted to confront Mr Steenson on his policies.<\/p>\n Moonen told garda\u00ed he was diagnosed with depression and he needed help. He fully admitted making the threats and apologised for his behaviour.<\/p>\n The court heard on Thursday that Moonen said he didn\u2019t mean what he said but appreciated that his words would have had an impact.<\/p>\n He pleaded guilty to making a threat to a garda to kill or cause serious harm to another person on May 15th, 2024. He has 12 previous convictions for public order offences and one for assault.<\/p>\n Reading from his own victim impact statement, Mr Steenson said this was not the first time in his political career that his life had been threatened.<\/p>\n He said \u201cwe are living in very tense political times\u201d and said that since this incident he has increased his security. He asked Judge Martin Nolan to consider a lenient sentence, saying \u201cI hope Mr Moonen has learned from these events and overcomes the challenges he already faces\u201d.<\/p>\n Judge Nolan said that Moonen had an irascible manner. He said that his previous public order offences, while of a less serious nature, were aggravating factors he had to consider.<\/p>\n He set a headline sentence of three years, which he reduced to 13 months to take mitigating factors into consideration including Moonen\u2019s co-operation with garda\u00ed and his personal difficulties.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A man who made threats to kill a Dublin city councillor has been jailed for 13 months. On…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":124746,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[45,615,61,60,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-124745","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-an-garda-siochana","9":"tag-dublin","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124745\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/124746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}