A man has been given a fully suspended sentence for damaging a Garda car following the Jobstown water charge protest in Dublin.
A number of Gardaí were inside when Dylan Collins from Bawnlea Green in Tallaght smashed the back window with a brick.
Last October, the Circuit Court set aside a finding that a teenage boy falsely imprisoned former Tánaiste Joan Burton and her adviser during a water charge protest in Jobstown in November 2014.
Six men, including Solidarity TD Paul Murphy, were cleared of the same charges last June and the DPP later dropped the charges against 10 others.
Dylan Collins, then 19-years-old, also attended the protest that day.
At around 4pm, just after Gardaí managed to get Ms. Burton out of the area, the court heard he threw a brick through the back window of a Garda car.
There were three Gardaí inside at the time but none of them were injured. Following his arrest, he made full admissions and acknowledged he was wrong and shouldn’t have done it.
Judge Martin Nolan accepted he got carried away in the overall anarchy and decided to fully suspend a two-and-a-half-year sentence.
Former Tánaiste Joan Burton and her advisor Karen O’Connell had left a graduation ceremony at An Cosan Education Centre at Jobstown, west Dublin, on 15 November 2014 when protesters surrounded their car, delaying them for three hours.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar told the Dáil in July of last year that the protest and fall-out from the events in Josbtown reminded him of ‘Lord of the Flies’, describing the scenes as “ugly” and “violent”.
Varadkar said: “I want to restate that I don’t condone in any way the actions of the protesters. There may have been nobody convicted but I think the scenes were ugly.
Varadkar added that he was “particularly struck” by the moment during the protest when a vote was taken on whether to keep the two women – Joan Burton and her adviser Karen O’Connell – at the scene overnight. ”That to me was more like a scene from Lord of the Flies than a scene from a peaceful protest.”
