A Co Donegal man who made a threat to kill a neighbour on a live video posted on Facebook has been fined after appearing in court.<\/p>\n
Horse-trainer Matthew Boyle appeared at Letterkenny District Court charged with making the threats to Paul Gibson.<\/p>\n
The court was told that Boyle, aged 33, of Parkview in Raphoe, posted the video following a dispute between the pair.<\/p>\n
He is charged that he did without lawful excuse, make to Paul Gibson a threat, intending the said Paul Gibson to believe it would be carried out, to kill or cause him serious harm.<\/p>\n
The charge is Contrary to Section 5 of the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act, 1997.<\/p>\n
Garda Sergeant Jim Collins said that it was \u201chighly unlikely\u201d that anybody would take the threats as \u201cviable\u201d and said the accused had some \u201cintellectual difficulties.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sergeant Collins said the threatening video had remained online for over an hour before Gardai contacted the accused.<\/p>\n
Solicitor for the accused, Mr Donough Cleary, said his client had pleaded to the charge and that a probation report on Boyle had been concise and helpful.<\/p>\n
He indicated that Boyle suffered from a mild learning difficulty.<\/p>\n
He added that his client expressed remorse for what he did and described his own actions as \u201cdisgraceful\u201d but said he acknowledged the video would have been disturbing.<\/p>\n
Mr Cleary said there was no animosity between the neighbours now and it has been three years since the video was posted in October, 2022.<\/p>\n
He added that the probation report had placed Boyle as being at a low risk of reoffending.
\u00a0
Sergeant Collins said that while it was accepted that a threat was made, he did not think it was a viable threat and does not think it would have been followed up on.<\/p>\n
Judge Emile Daly said the difficulty when posting material online, especially a video, is that it can give rise to bad behaviour from others who may view the video.<\/p>\n
She addressed Boyle and told him this type of behaviour cannot happen again, adding that she noted it hasn\u2019t since and that is a good thing.<\/p>\n
Again stressing to the accused that this was a serious matter, she fined Boyle \u20ac280.<\/p>\n
Horse-trainer who threatened to kill neighbour on Facebook video is fined was last modified: November 11th, 2025 by Staff Writer<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tTags:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Co Donegal man who made a threat to kill a neighbour on a live video posted on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":133902,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1457,1485,823,42,77932,43,22430,13555,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-133901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-court","tag-donegal","tag-facebook","tag-headlines","tag-matthew-boyle","tag-news","tag-raphoe","tag-threats","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133901","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=133901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133901\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/133902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}