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Wrongly convicted man jailed for 11 months was leader of south Dublin drugs gang

The Court of Appeal ruled last month that Declan Tynan was a victim of a miscarriage of justice when he was wrongly found guilty of violent disorder at a bookies in Tallaght

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A criminal who led a gang at the centre of a feud spent 11 months in jail after being wrongly convicted over a violent incident at a bookmakers.

The Court of Appeal ruled last month that Declan Tynan of Vincent Street Flats, Dublin 8, was a victim of a miscarriage of justice when he was wrongly found guilty of violent disorder at Ladbrokes bookmakers in Killinarden, Tallaght on December 13, 2012.

The prosecution’s case was that Tynan was one of three men who burst into the bookmakers on the day in question and set upon a customer standing in the middle of the shop as part a feud.

One of the attackers had a short blade and began stabbing the man repeatedly. When the victim’s brother tried to intervene, the group of men turned on him.

While his two co-accused pleaded guilty Tynan always maintained his innocence and his conviction was quashed after another person came forward to say he was the third person involved in the attack.

At the time of the incident Tynan was heading a mob of 35 young criminals based in St Vincent Street flats.

Tynan, whose father Tomo Tynan was an infamous bank robber shot by garda after taking hostages during a robbery, had been involved in a number of bitter disputes with rival criminals in south Dublin.

There had been dozens of violent incidents linked to a row with Paul Geraghty, the partner of Brian Rattigan’s former girlfriend Natasha McEnroe.

The gangs were feuding with each other for several years due to a petty dispute that had escalated out of control.

Geraghty narrowly avoided an assassination bid in 2011 after shots were fired at his car on Charlemont Street and associates of Tynan were blamed for the shooting.

Tynan’s associates were also blamed for setting up Crumlin man Declan O’Reilly to be murdered when he was shot dead in front of his young son in Dublin in September 2012.

Ironically, Geraghty and McEnroe, who had been associates of O’Reilly, were both arrested in connection with his death but later released without charges and denied any involvement.

​​​​​​Tynan’s family home was subsequently targeted in fake pipe bomb incidents which gardai believe were linked to associates of O’Reilly.

Several people involved in the feuding left Dublin in the aftermath of the killing due to threats from both sides.

Tynan wasn’t the first member of his family to be involved in crime.

His father Thomas ‘Tomo’ Tynan, who died in 2016, was a member of Martin ‘the General’ Cahill’s south Dublin gang and was also an armed robber with the so-called Athy gang – a group of Dublin criminals who targeted banks in rural towns in the 1980s and early 1990s.

The gang were so prolific that they were said to have made over €300,000 from more than 30 robberies in 1989 alone.

However, gardai received a tip-off that the gang would be carrying out a robbery on the Bank of Ireland in Athy on January 12, 1990 and set up an operation to catch them in the act.

Gardai opened fire killing one raider and injuring two others as they tried to flee the scene with three hostages from the bank.

Austin Higgins (26) who was one of the five-man gang, was fatally wounded by a bullet to the head while Tynan and another gang member were shot by gardai but survived.

Tynan and other members of the gang were later jailed for 12 years for firearms and robbery offences.

Declan Tynan followed his father into a life of crime to lead a gang of young drug dealers based around the south inner city.

However, he was jailed in 2013 for drug dealing to an undercover cop. There was an attempt on Tynan’s life before he was jailed.

After serving that sentence, he found himself back before the court in relation to the incident at the bookmakers in Tallaght and the jury found him guilty.

Tynan was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment with the final year suspended by Judge Patricia Ryan on January 13, 2017.

Tynan then sought to appeal his conviction focusing on the “perils of visual identification”. However, the three-judge Court of Appeal dismissed his application and affirmed his conviction.

However, after the rejected appeal, Tynan’s senior counsel, Michael O’Higgins, told the Court of Appeal that someone else had “come forward” in relation to the attack.

This person had provided a statement claiming he was the third person involved in the attack, Mr O’Higgins said.

The case returned to the Court of Appeal in April 2018 where Tynan’s conviction was quashed under Section 2 of the Criminal Procedure Act 1993.

At the Court of Appeal on Friday, Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy said the court would grant Mr Tynan a certificate of miscarriage of justice.​

​He said the core issue in the case was the process of identification made by gardai and that there had been “a want of material regarding disclosure that could have been of use to the defence in testing the reliability of the identification”.

Mr Justice McCarthy said a subsequent evaluation by the Met Police in the UK of photos of the appellant and the man who claims to be the guilty party analysed alongside stills from the bookmakers confirmed Mr Tynan’s innocence.