A Fine Gael councillor proposed for a council meeting to have GoSafe vans moved while he was at the same time engaging with a senior garda to have a speeding fine quashed, a court heard on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Four members of An Garda Siochana and a retired superintendent are on trial at Limerick Circuit Criminal Court charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice in relation to the cancelling of fixed charge notices.<\/p>\n
The trial was shown a series of WhatsApp messages between retired Superintendent Eamon O\u2019Neill and Fine Gael councillor Liam Galvin following the detection of Mr Galvin speeding.<\/p>\n
In November 2017, Mr Galvin was detected doing 142km\/h in a 120km\/h zone on the M20 near Patrickswell in Co Limerick. He messaged then Superintendent O\u2019Neill.<\/p>\n
The two men exchanged messages about the issue on a number of occasions afterwards and at one point Mr Galvin included an attachment in his WhatsApp that was a screenshot of an agenda paper for a council meeting.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI will move a motion at the next meeting that the government review the location of the Go safe vans in Co Limerick.\u201d On the message Mr Galvin wrote \u201cHa ha ha.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
In an earlier exchange Mr Galvin messaged Supt O\u2019Neill: \u201cCan you sort that for me?\u201d to which he received the response \u201cAm trying my friend\u201d.<\/p>\n
Galvin replied: \u201cWork your powers\u201d before O\u2019Neill messaged: \u201cHow many have you got atm\u201d. The court heard that atm stood for at the moment. This is understood to be a reference to penalty points on Mr Galvin\u2019s licence.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot sure but lots,\u201d Mr Galvin replied. The court was told that the intention was to get the matter \u201csquared\u201d when it came to court.<\/p>\n
The trial also heard that then Supt O\u2019Neill was contacted by a brother of Limerick hurler Aaron Gillane with a request to \u201csquare\u201d a Fixed Charge Notice he received. There followed an exchange of messages between the two men and later a series of telephone calls and messages between Supt O\u2019Neill and Aaron Gillane about the matter.<\/p>\n
The court heard evidence from crime scene analyst Laura Galligan about the contents of Mr O\u2019Neill\u2019s phone which included a number of WhatsApp groups. One group which had 65 members, including members of the Limerick senior hurling panel, was titled LSH.<\/p>\n
Mr O\u2019Neill, and four serving garda\u00ed, Sergeant Anne-Marie Hassett, Sergeant Michelle Leahy, Garda Tom McGlinchey and Garda Colin Geary, are accused of a total of 39 counts of \u201cengaging in conduct tending and intended to pervert the course of justice\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Fine Gael councillor proposed for a council meeting to have GoSafe vans moved while he was at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":185848,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[54,7782,61,60,43],"class_list":["post-185847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-courts","tag-gardai","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185847","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=185847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185847\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/185848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}