The guilty verdict originally handed down by the Special Criminal Court was a bad one, which created a dangerous precedent in convicting an individual on the sole basis of the evidence of an accomplice – in this instance the man who had admitted that he had loaded the gun that was used in the killing, Charles Bowden. Now that it has been overturned, it is unlikely that evidence of this kind can be deemed to be sufficient on its own to convict an accused, ever again. Without a shadow of doubt, this is a good thing.

The murder of Veronica Guerin was a brutal and appalling action, carried out by individuals who are, without doubt, enemies of society and who deserve to be faced with the full rigours of the law. In the hysteria that followed, however, the feeling took hold that those presumed to be responsible should be put behind bars, no matter what it took. This is always a malign basis for the pursuit of any investigation. It is a context in which the abuse of power almost inevitably flourishes. And in the case of the State v. Paul Ward, it did.

The Gardaí claimed that Paul Ward had made crucial confessions regarding his own role in the murder. However, in the original trial, a very strong case was made by the defence, undermining the veracity of these confessions. Descriptions of the interrogation techniques to which Paul Ward was subjected made harrowing reading. It is indicative of the real disquiet, to which the methods employed by the investigating team gave rise, that the Special Criminal Court eventually decided that the alleged admissions had to be discounted. “The court is not persuaded that there is any evidence which is corroborative of the evidence of Charles Bowden,” the judgement stated – a conclusion which represented a severe rebuke to the Gardai for the way in which they had conducted their investigations.

The conviction that followed was the cause of major surprise in legal circles at the time. As a layman, even I could see immediately that it was unsound. In an article in the Irish Times, Adrian Hardiman – then a senior counsel, and now a Supreme Court judge – stressed the danger of relying on the evidence ofaccomplices for convictions. “If the accomplice is a hardened criminal, or worse still a supergrass,” he said, “his evidence is always profoundly suspect, and a conviction relying on it, in the absence of corroboration, will be rare.” Reading between the lines, you could tell that Hardiman was unhappy that any conviction at all had been built on such a patently flimsy and unreliable foundation.

Now, that decision has been overturned. Paul Ward will not, however, walk free as a result. In January of 1997, he was on remand in Mountjoy prison. There, he participated in a siege, in the course of which a number of prison officers were injured. For his part in the siege and the fighting which ensued, Paul Ward was given a twelve year prison sentence.

Now it may well be that Paul Ward is a decidedly unsavoury character. Certainly, he has been on the wrong side of the law for a long time, having racked up over twenty convictions in as many years. But what kind of justice is it that he should remain in jail on the basis of a disturbance that took place at a time when he should not have been in prison at all?

If the riot had not taken place, he would by now have spent five years of his life in jail for a crime of which the Court of Criminal Appeal has now decided it is unsafe to convict him. In itself, that was a completely unsatisfactory position. And yet, in most of the coverage of the decision of the appeal court, journalists have been only too happy to point out that the disappointment of Gardaí is tempered by the fact that Ward still has a significant portion of his sentence for his involvement in the riot to serve – as if we all really know that he is guilty, and, again, that he should be banged up even if it can’t be proven.

Any demurral in relation to this dangerous consensus tends to be seen as the bleatings of a namby-pamby liberal. There is a school of thought that the cops should be allowed to get on with the dirty business of sticking the ‘crims’ behind bars without having to go through the distracting and bureaucratic procedures involved in actually charging them and bringing them to court for crimes they actually have committed.

But the fact, as any sixteen year-old juvenile delinquent will tell you, is that there are those within the Gardai who will stitch you up, for their own reasons (good or bad), if they get half a chance. In this regard, what has been emerging in the McBrearty case in Donegal is instructive.

Frank McBrearty is different from Paul Ward, in that he had always been considered – and had considered himself – a law-abiding citizen. However, McBrearty and other members of his family became the focus of a Garda murder investigation, following the death – in what (at first) was assumed to be a hit-and-run accident – in Raphoe, of a local man Richie Barron. Despite Garda claims that they were in possession of a murder confession from McBrearty, no charges were brought. However, over the course of the next three years, more than 160 separate charges, some of them very serious – and all of them highly damaging to the reputation of the McBreartys and to their business – were in fact brought against members of the McBrearty family, in relation to a variety of road traffic and licensing matters.

That a conspiracy was afoot to get Frank McBrearty “off the streets” no longer seems to be in doubt. Last week, on the same day that Paul Ward’s conviction was quashed, Bernard Conlon from Sligo became the first individual to be tried, as a result of the McBrearty case. He was convicted of making false statements, which had incriminated Frank McBrearty, to gardai.

In evidence, it was stated by the defence that Bernard Conlon is of sub-normal intelligence. He had been got at by Gardaí, the defence further claimed, and convinced that he was engaged in important surveillance work. He had been bribed by Gardaí into giving evidence against McBrearty.

Reading descriptions of what happened, as the Gardai attempted to build up their case against the publican and his family – first on the murder charge and later in relation to the alleged sale of drugs on his premises – the picture that emerges is truly astonishing. You are left wondering what could possibly have been at stake, that policemen would risk so much to secure a conviction? It was all to no avail when – the lives of the McBreartys having effectively been ruined over a five year period – during 2001, the Director of Public Prosecutions finally dropped the last of the charges against members of the family.

There are those who will refuse to believe that members of the force charged with the responsibility of maintaining the law could systematically go about encouraging others to bend it and break it. So far, the misfortunate Conlon is the only one who has been charged. Why this is the case remains a mystery.

We can only hope that this will change, now that a first conviction has been secured. In the meantime, the implication of all this is inescapable. It doesn’t matter that the vast majority of Gardaí are very well motivated. The methods that they use must always be subjected to the closest form of scrutiny. And furthermore, they must be required to produce more that the word of an accomplice to secure a conviction.

And as for Paul Ward – well, there is certainly merit in the argument that his sentence, for the part he played in the prison riot, should be suspended. I bet that’ll be a popular thought, eh?