Derek Farrelly (41) of Somerville Drive, Dublin 12, appeared at Bray District Court for sentencing. The accused entered a guilty plea to one count of theft of a \u20ac250 deposit.<\/p>\n
The court heard that the Director of Public Prosecutions directed that the case could be dealt with by summary disposal only if Mr Farley entered a guilty plea.<\/p>\n
Summary disposal means the case is dealt with in the District Court by a judge alone, rather than being sent forward to the Circuit Court for trial before a judge and jury, which can carry more serious penalties.<\/p>\n
Sergeant Mick Dee told the court that in September 2021 Mr Farley agreed to carry out home improvement work at the complainant\u2019s home.<\/p>\n
Mr Farley was contacted via Facebook Marketplace and agreed to undertake the work once a \u20ac250 deposit was paid into his bank account. He received the payment on January 8, 2022.<\/p>\n
Garda\u00ed later received a statement of complaint from the homeowner, and copies of the correspondence were handed into court.<\/p>\n
Sgt Dee said that Mr Farley has 35 previous convictions and received a two-year sentence in 2024 for driving without a licence.<\/p>\n
The court also heard that at Court 4 of the The Criminal Courts of Justice in Dublin in July 2022, Mr Farley was fined for deception against another customer of his business.<\/p>\n
Judge David Kennedy asked what distinguished this offence from the previous matter, with Sgt Dee stating that on this occasion the accused used the funds for his business, making it a different type of offence.<\/p>\n
Barrister for Mr Farley, Sarah Patton BL, said her client had operated a business and had intended to carry out the work, but that the business later went \u201cbust\u201d.<\/p>\n
She said that if given four weeks, her client, who is currently serving a sentence on unrelated matters, could gather the money to reimburse the injured party.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe has had four years to do so and I\u2019m not convinced,\u201d Judge Kennedy said. He fined Mr Farley \u20ac2,000 and imposed a 10-month prison sentence, which he suspended in full.<\/p>\n
Funded by the Court Reporting Scheme <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Derek Farrelly (41) of Somerville Drive, Dublin 12, appeared at Bray District Court for sentencing. The accused entered…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":356203,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13228,61,60,43],"class_list":["post-356202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-darragh-mccann","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356202","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=356202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356202\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/356203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=356202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=356202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=356202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}