Blarney Castle owner granted permission to challenge road traffic convictions

The owner of Blarney Castle in Cork has been granted permission by the High Court to legally challenge two road traffic convictions.

The case centres on overwritten CCTV footage in his case.

Charles Colthurst is seeking a judicial review of the two convictions he received for drink-driving and dangerous driving handed down by Fermoy District Court on October 11, 2024.

The two offences were said to have occurred on September 17, 2023, when Mr Colthurst was in a silver VW Golf on the M8 motorway, Gortnahown, Mitchelstown, Cork, and on the M8 Ballinglanna, North Kilworth, Cork.

At the High Court yesterday, David Staunton BL, instructed by Michael Powell Solicitors, for Mr Colthurst, successfully applied to the court for leave to challenge the two convictions over overwritten CCTV evidence.

Mr Colthurst is seeking the judicial review quashing the order of the convictions and is further seeking a High Court order that the grant of leave will operate as a stay on both convictions.

Mr Staunton said the district court had said CCTV sought by the defence in the matter was relevant to the case and solicitors for Mr Colthurst wrote to Fermoy Garda Station on November 20, 2023, seeking CCTV in the case to be preserved.

On November 29, 2023, Mr Colthurst’s lawyers were told by gardaí that the CCTV from the public office where Mr Colthurst underwent garda observation had been overwritten after 28 days and was no longer available.

Footage

The defence maintained that a 20-minute period of garda observation of Mr Colthurst had not been an uninterrupted one, and sought the footage.

Mr Colthurst’s lawyers submitted to the High Court that “the footage was crucial to his defence”.

The district court judge deemed the disclosure relevant, and ordered that expert inspection of the CCTV system be facilitated, and the matter was adjourned to April 12, 2024.

The adjournment was to see if defence experts in CCTV could still retrieve footage from Fermoy garda station even though it had been overwritten.

Defence technicians were able to recover footage from 16 different channels on the system and, in total, 4,401 pieces of footage, and said in October 2024 they could still identify footage from December 9, 2023.

The footage of the public office, however, could not be recovered, while other channels proved fruitful.

Inspection

Lawyers for Mr Colthurst claim that if the hard drive had been retained for inspection during the month of December 2023 — when the prosecution were fully aware of the issues and had engaged in correspondence with the applicant — it was reasonable to assume that the footage from September 17, 2023, would still have been available.

After several adjournments during April to October 2024, during which the judge marked the case peremptory against Mr Colthurst, the court heard the case and convicted the applicant of both offences.

Lawyers for Mr Colthurst claim that even if the material was deleted before the November 2023 request for the CCTV, it was capable of being recovered “despite claims made to the contrary”.

“The court would have been in receipt of evidence which concerned the fairness of the proceedings,” they stated.

The prosecution had failed to seek out, preserve, or retain footage despite being requested to do so in November 2023, Mr Colthurst’s lawyers submitted.

At the High Court yesterday, Mr Staunton was granted leave to pursue the challenge, and Ms Justice Mary Rose Geary adjourned the matter to April.