A miscarriage of justice which saw a Galway man being wrongly convicted of sexually assaulting a young girl could now cost the State up to €1 million in compensation.
According to reports Michael Feichin Hannon (34 ), who received a suspended four year prison sentence in 1999 after a 10-year-old girl claimed he had molested her, intends to sue the State. The Court of Criminal Appeal declared last Monday that the conviction had been a miscarriage of justice after Una Hardester admitted that she had made up the allegations in 1997 during a time when her family had been involved in a land dispute with relatives of Mr Hannon.
Ms Hardester, who now works in a New York university, returned to Ireland in 2006 to admit the truth thereby finally clearing Mr Hannon’s name. The 21-year-old woman, who is the daughter of American actor Croften Hardester who appeared in Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, RTE soap Fair City, and 1980s TV series The A-Team, has said that she would be willing to return to Ireland if charged with making false allegations.
Mr Hannon of Attymon, Athenry, received the suspended sentence at Galway Circuit Court in 1999. He strongly denied the allegations of sexually assualting Ms Hardester at her home in Cleggan, near Clifden, in January 1997. The house was sold and the Hardesters moved to Connecticut in the US.
The Court of Criminal Appeal quashed the conviction in February 2008. An application to have the conviction declared a miscarriage of justice had been strongly opposed by the DPP who argued that there had been no wrongdoing by the State or any of its agents.
