A businessman who admitted carrying out a campaign of harmful communications against a golf manager at Druids Glen Golf Club in Co Wicklow has been given an 18-month suspended sentence. <\/p>\n
Passing sentence at Wicklow Circuit Criminal Court on Tuesday, Judge Sin\u00e9ad N\u00ed Ch\u00falach\u00e1in said Niall Barry (74), of Coolnavee, Hillside, Greystones, had orchestrated a \u201csustained, persistent and vile\u201d campaign of abuse against Marcus Doyle on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and by email over a number of years. <\/p>\n
The court heard Barry wrote to hundreds of golf clubs across the country making baseless allegations against Doyle and that these impacted his personal and professional standing, mental health, promotion prospects and career development.<\/p>\n
The court heard Barry had a grievance over the governance of Druids Glen and later with Golf Ireland, formerly the Golfing Union of Ireland, when that body rejected his complaint against the club. He called Doyle \u201ca liar\u201d and \u201ca weasel\u201d and said he was \u201cuntrustworthy\u201d. <\/p>\n
Barry was charged with one count of sending harmful communications, contrary to Section 4 of the Harassment, Harmful Communications and Related Offences Act 2020. He previously pleaded guilty to the charge. <\/p>\n
The judge said the offences were at the higher end of the scale and that a headline sentence of 24 months was appropriate. She reduced it to 18 months after taking into account Barry\u2019s guilty plea and his offer of \u20ac25,000 \u201cas a token of remorse, not compensation\u201d. <\/p>\n
She suspended the sentence for five years on condition that Barry not contact Doyle directly or indirectly for 10 years. She also ordered Barry to take down all remaining comments he can find about Doyle on his social media channels. <\/p>\n
More to follow …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A businessman who admitted carrying out a campaign of harmful communications against a golf manager at Druids Glen…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":550217,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[40],"tags":[12767,9,10,18,17590,13,14,2527,147185,147184,6,789,19,42101,17,5428,11,12,34659,12808,15,16,520,3119,5,32294,119,147186,147187,17135,64259,59687,7,8,14529],"class_list":["post-550216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-black","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-eire","tag-equipment","tag-featured-news","tag-featurednews","tag-golf","tag-golf-club","tag-golf-driver-cap","tag-headlines","tag-horizontal","tag-ie","tag-individual-sports","tag-ireland","tag-iron","tag-latest-news","tag-latestnews","tag-light","tag-luxury","tag-main-news","tag-mainnews","tag-morning","tag-new","tag-news","tag-set","tag-sport","tag-sports-and-fitness","tag-sports-backgrounds","tag-sun","tag-sunlight","tag-sunset","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories","tag-tree"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116800094536779131","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=550216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550216\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/550217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=550216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=550216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=550216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}