{"id":39653,"date":"2025-09-24T00:15:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-24T00:15:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/39653\/"},"modified":"2025-09-24T00:15:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-24T00:15:10","slug":"donegal-councillor-sent-for-trial-charged-with-stealing-phone-of-colleague-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/39653\/","title":{"rendered":"Donegal councillor sent for trial charged with stealing phone of colleague \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall b-it-article-body__text--left\">A <a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/donegal\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/donegal\/\">Donegal<\/a> county councillor has been sent forward for trial charged with stealing a mobile phone from another county councillor.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Cllr Frank McBrearty appeared at Letterkenny District Court where he faced one charge.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">The 56-year-old from Tullyvinney, Raphoe, was in court for the short hearing.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">The charge arises out of an alleged incident during a special meeting of Donegal County Council at the Aura Leisure Centre, Sallaghrane, Letterkenny on July 11th, 2022.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall b-it-article-body__text--left\">Mr McBrearty is charged with stealing property, to wit, a Samsung S21 Ultra Mobile phone valued at \u20ac1,000, the property of Gary Doherty.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">The offence is contrary to Section 4 of the Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act 2001.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Garda Gillian Page gave evidence to the court of serving a book of evidence in the case on the accused and told the court that he made no reply.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall b-it-article-body__text--left\">Garda Sgt Maurice Doyle said the Director of Public Prosecutions had consented for the case to go forward on indictment to the next sitting of Letterkenny Circuit Court commencing on October 28th.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall b-it-article-body__text--left\">Solicitor for  Mr McBrearty, Patsy Gallagher, said the case will be fully contested.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall b-it-article-body__text--left\">Mr Gallagher said he was applying for both a senior and junior counsel in the case, given the facts, and what he described as \u201cthe complexities\u201d, outlined.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">He also applied for free legal aid on behalf of his client which was granted.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Judge Ciaran Liddy issued the alibi warning to the accused and granted Mr Gallagher both senior and junior counsel.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall b-it-article-body__text--left\">Mr McBrearty was released on his own nominal bond of \u20ac100 to appear at Letterkenny Circuit Court commencing on October 28th.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">However, the accused initially refused to sign the bond saying there were copies of other papers beneath the bond. He claimed that garda\u00ed had previously forged his signature and that he would only sign each page separately.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">The bond was eventually signed.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Solicitor Michael Staines told the court that he was keeping a watching brief on behalf of Donegal County Council.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Donegal county councillor has been sent forward for trial charged with stealing a mobile phone from another&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":39654,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[45,1485,30206,61,60,43],"class_list":{"0":"post-39653","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ireland","8":"tag-an-garda-siochana","9":"tag-donegal","10":"tag-donegal-county-council","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39653","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=39653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39653\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}