They broke my heart, my bank account and my balls, says lawyer in Oz extradition case

LIAM COLLINS

Sun 14 Dec 2008 at 00:00 UP DATED BY WATCHERS MARCH 2025.

A former high-profile Dublin solicitor is having the entire eight-volume report of the Morris Tribunal investigation into garda corruption read into the record of an Australian court, in a bid to avoid extradition.

Vincent O’Donoghue, who was arrested in Australia on foot of an extradition warrant issued in relation to a Dublin property company, has been fighting warrants for his extradition for the last six years — and his case gained huge notoriety because an alleged Nazi war criminal has copied his defence.

Mr O’Donoghue, who became a bankrupt in 1993 over a debt of £320,000, now says the taxpayers have had to foot a bill running to into millions of euro trying to have him extradited over an alleged property deal valued at less than €50,000.

“They’ve broken by heart, my bank account and my balls for five years,” says the colourful Mr O’Donoghue, who first became widely known in Dublin property circles when he bought Archbishop John Charles McQuaid’s Killiney palace as his residence in the Eighties.

“I reckon it has cost the taxpayers about Aus$14m (€6.8m) so far, over a claim that amounts to €32,000 and involves just two or three people.” He says it was always a matter of contract law, not criminal law.

Since arriving in Australia, Mr O’Donoghue has married his partner, Anne Marie, and they have four children — Emma, 7, Dillon, 5, Grace, 3, and Molly, 2. The three youngest were born in Australia. Mr O’Donoghue is now acting as a property and planning consultant and has been fighting his extradition in both the Australian and Irish courts.

“I am still battling,” he said last week from his home in Perth.

However, he has been allowed to read the entire transcripts of the Morris Tribunal, which investigated garda wrong-doing in Donegal, into the court record in Western Australia. He claims that it is part of his defence — that if he is sent back to Ireland to stand trial, he could be victimised by the gardai.

He was able to get a copy of the report from the Morris Tribunal on a ‘memory stick’ and all 6,000 pages were downloaded into the court system of Western Australia.

Mr O’Donoghue was first arrested in the North on July 11, 2002, in relation to his dealings in a Belfast property company.

That matter was dismissed by the Magistrates Court in Belfast, and his civil claim for damages for wrongful arrest and false imprisonment is still before the High Court in Belfast. He was arrested in Australia on Christmas Eve — and he believes that both arrests were timed to cause him maximum damage.

He was also arrested in Dublin, in 2000, and was questioned for a day in Mountjoy Garda Station, but released without charge.

“In 2004, when they started coming after me in Australia, I wasn’t even in Ireland — and that, to my mind, is bizarre.”

Since then, Mr O’Donoghue has been to the highest level in the courts of Western Australia, the Federal Courts, and the High Court (which operates at the same as the Irish Supreme Court) in Canberra to fight his extradition.

The case is still proceeding through the Magistrates court and is going through the Federal Courts with regard to various rulings and orders.

Mr O’Donoghue, who grew up in Ireland, says that he now regards Australia as his home.

“Three of our children were born here, we live and work here and there are great opportunities in this country. There are great opportunities and we enjoy the lifestyle enormously,” he says.

Reflecting on his long legal battle, Mr O’Donoghue is amazed at the costs that the Irish state has been prepared to incur to get one man back to stand trial for the alleged misappropriation of a very small sum of money.

“What astonishes me is that the Irish authorities are relying on the Australian taxpayer to foot the bill for this whole thing — it makes no sense.”

In the early stages of his appeal, the solicitor was joined by an 85-year-old alleged Nazi war criminal, Charles Zentai, who is invloved in a fight to prevent his extradition from Australia to Hungry, where he was accused of taking part in the fatal beating of a Jewish teenager during the final stages of the Second World War. Both Mr Zentai and Mr O’Donoghue lost their initial Federal court challenge.