Trinity College Dublin associate professor of law Eoin O’Dell likened Graham Dwyer’s appeals process to a soccer match that is only 60 minutes in. Graham Dwyer was convicted in 2015 of the murder of Elaine O'Hara. Picture: Collins Courts. Sat, 25 Mar, 2023 - 02:05
Sean Murray & Cillian Sherlock
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Graham Dwyer’s bid to overturn his conviction for the murder of Elaine O’Hara could persist for several more years, despite the Court of Appeal dismissing all grounds for his appeal yesterday. If successful in future appeals, it may result in him facing a retrial for Ms O’Hara’s murder, legal experts said. Furthermore, upcoming Supreme Court decisions in cases, such as Patrick Quirke’s appeal against his conviction for the murder of DJ Bobby Ryan, could point the way for how it may rule in Dwyer’s case. Cork-born architect Dwyer, 50, who was convicted on March 27, 2015, had launched an appeal on numerous grounds, including the admissibility of mobile phone data evidence. Delivering the decision, president of the Court of Appeal George Birmingham said the court was quite satisfied that the admission of very limited call data could not be perceived of arising to a miscarriage of justice in this case. "There is no miscarriage of justice here," he said. "We have not been persuaded that the trial was unfair or that the verdict was unsafe, and we dismiss the appeal." Further legal avenues
Trinity College Dublin associate professor of law Eoin O’Dell said that, following this setback for Dwyer, he does have further legal avenues to explore, likening it to a soccer match that is only 60 minutes in. “He has to apply for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court,” said Mr O’Dell. “If they grant the appeal, it has to come on to Supreme Court. They might make a reference to the European Court of Justice, and that has to come back. And then the Supreme Court has to give its decision. If he’s successful, what he’s looking for a retrial.”
Last April, Dwyer won a case in Europe about the mobile data retention practices used in the case against him, and his appeal was heard in December. Data held in Dwyer’s work phone was used in the trial to demonstrate how it placed the device at specific places at particular times and dates. The Court of Justice of the EU ruled that EU law precludes the general and indiscriminate retention of traffic and location data relating to electronic communication for the purpose of combating serious crime. In the judgement yesterday, Mr Justice Bermingham said that the “admission of the very limited call data evidence that was admitted could not conceivably be regarded as giving rise to a miscarriage of justice”. On the request from investigators for the phone data, he said Garda actions were in full compliance of provisions of an act of the Oireachtas and "enjoyed a presumption of constitutionality". He said while there was evidence from the parallel movements of phones at issue in the case, there was evidence of the same effect which was independent and "arguably more compelling". He outlined alternative routes of the identification of the suspect through "traditional detective work" and other evidence. Upcoming cases
Mr O’Dell said the issue of mobile phone evidence and how data is gathered will be significant in a number of upcoming cases. “In other cases, where the mobile phone evidence is more significant and there’s less other evidence, these legal issues might be more important,” he said. Furthermore, upcoming Supreme Court decisions such as in the Quirke case and a case involving a Kinahan hitman could highlight how it will rule in such cases before Dwyer’s comes to that court, Mr O’Dell added. Read More

Graham Dwyer bid to overturn conviction may not be over

Stephen Bourke
Tue Mar 21 2023 - 19:22
A senior Trinity College manager sacked after pleading guilty to sexual assault has been told by the Workplace Relations Commission that the Probation Act does not include any sort of employment protection. Brendan Leahy had taken a “gamble” on legal advice that he would get the Probation Act when he pleaded guilty, and made no mention to his employer that he had been charged with sexual assault until he phoned its head of human resources on the way home from court in March 2021. His sacking from his €120,000-a-year job as head of facilities at Trinity College Dublin was upheld by the employment tribunal, which rejected his complaint under the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977 in a decision published on Tuesday. The tribunal heard that Mr Leahy’s District Court conviction on March 24th, 2021, which left him with a three-month suspended prison sentence and a €1,000 fine, was widely reported in the national media the same day. READ MORE
“The advice was that in pleading guilty [to the sexual assault charge] it would be viewed well by the courts; it was considered at the lowest end, minor in nature,” Mr Leahy said of discussions with the solicitors he instructed for the criminal matter. Mr Leahy later appealed to Dublin Circuit Criminal Court and got the Probation Act in July 2021. The tribunal heard Mr Leahy wrote to the college’s HR department in early August 2021 stating that the Circuit Court order meant his conviction had been “disposed of” – but the college pressed ahead with its investigation. However, a further allegation against Mr Leahy was made to the college by a former employee identified only as Ms X, who accused him of sexually harassing her at a Christmas party in December 2017 by miming a sex act at her from across the room. Disciplinary minutes opened to the tribunal include references made by Mr Leahy to “family issues” and “a very bad relationship with alcohol” at the time of the alleged Christmas party incident in December 2017 and the incident giving rise to his guilty plea to sexual assault. Giving evidence in January, the university’s disciplinary officer, academic secretary Patricia Callaghan, said: “In many ways he [Mr Leahy] gambled. There’s a gamble there if you have that kind of advice.”
Counsel for the complainant, Aaron Shearer BL, said there had been a “value judgment” by HR staff in the university on the seriousness of his client’s conviction and that the Circuit Court had considered the matter to be “trivial”. His client’s position was that the investigation into the sexual assault conviction ought to have been stopped when the Probation Act was applied. Mr Shearer also said that comments included in the investigation report from Mr Leahy’s superiors had “predetermined” the disciplinary proceedings – adding that a delay of three years and four months before investigating the Ms X matter was “inordinate and inexcusable”. In his decision, adjudicating officer David James Murphy indicated he had seen “flaws in the process” but that he was satisfied they “did not result in any actual unfairness to the complainant”. He wrote that if he was to agree with Mr Leahy’s position that Trinity was legally obliged to “ignore his guilty plea” after the Probation Act was applied, the legislation would “need to expressly provide the offender with additional employment related protections”. “It does not,” he wrote. He wrote that if Mr Leahy had wanted to convince Trinity College that the sexual assault was minor enough that it didn’t justify his sacking, then “it was for him to provide the circumstances and relevant details” to the investigation and disciplinary process and that it was a “mistake” for him “not to engage”. Mr Murphy wrote that Trinity College was entitled to consider this sequence of events to be “serious misconduct” – adding that the disciplinary officer was also entitled to uphold a finding of sexual harassment in the Ms X matter. He ruled Mr Leahy “was not unfairly dismissed”.

Senior Trinity College employee ‘not unfairly dismissed’ after pleading to sexual assault

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NEW YORK – Investigators at the University of Pavia and other international centers used modern-day population genetic data to untangle the complex history of an Indigenous Ashaninka population found in Amazon rainforest regions of Peru and Brazil. "There were only a few genetic studies about the Ashaninka and their origins [in the past], despite being the largest among the 51 Indigenous groups currently living in Amazonian Peru," first and co-corresponding author Marco Rosario Capodiferro, a genetics researcher affiliated with Trinity College Dublin and the University of Pavia, and co-senior author Alessandro Achilli, at the University of Pavia, said in an email. Capodiferro and Achilli further noted that prior studies pointed to "significant isolation and genetic homogeneity within the group," as well as "genetic distance from other Peruvian Indigenous groups." In contrast, the latest study, appearing in Current Biology on Thursday , pointed to unexpected genetic variation within the Ashaninka population. When the researchers used array-based genotyping to profile genetic patterns in 51 Ashaninka individuals living in the Amazon region of Peru, they identified two genetic clusters — dubbed Ashaninka1 and Ashaninka2 — that highlighted distinct population histories and relationships within the seemingly uniform Ashaninka population, which all speak a language from the Arawakan language family. In particular, the team's results pointed to ancestry from Indigenous groups that migrated to the Amazonian rainforest region from more southerly sites near the Atlantic coast area and the so-called Southern Cone. That migration appears to have been followed by differential mixing with other Indigenous groups from the Andes or Pacific regions. "The genetic structure of the Americas has been shaped by multiple waves of migration, leading to admixture events challenging our ability to reconstruct its genetic history," the authors noted, explaining that the current results are consistent with "gene flow from southeastern South America" as an initial ancestry source for the Ashaninka population. Based on available historical documents, the team suspects that the Andean ancestry found in some of the Ashaninka individuals reflects trading between Ashaninka and Andean groups in the period leading up to the Inca Empire — interactions that may have led to genetic mixing and the adoption of some cultural materials and customs from the Andean group. "We recognized that these trade exchanges also implied the movement of people and gene flow admixture, which probably took place … before the Inca Empire," Capodiferro and Achilli noted. "This exchange did not impact homogeneously the entire Ashaninka group, leading to the differentiation of subgroups based on the degree of interaction with other Peruvian populations." More broadly, the team's genetic analyses provided a clearer look at the apparent genetic ties between Arawakan language-speaking Ashaninka ancestry groups and populations from Caribbean sites falling to the north of the Amazon. "Genetic connections between the spread of the Arawakan family language and the Ceramic Indigenous group of the Caribbean islands have been proposed and dismissed in turn," Capodiferro and Achilli explained, noting that findings from the current study revealed "high proximity between the Peruvian Ashaninka and the Caribbean Ceramic groups." Consequently, they said, "it is conceivable that the Ashaninka ancestors [who] took part in a south-north migration across South America were also involved in the transition from Archaic to Ceramic culture in the Caribbean Islands."

Amazon Rainforest Population History Informed by New Genetic Data

Understanding the effect of MXene in a TMO/MXene hybrid catalyst for the oxygen evolution reaction

Garden of the TCD School of Botany. Image: Trinity College Dublin
The herbarium in TCD is one of only two substantial herbaria in Ireland and contains around 400,000 plant specimens, providing researchers opportunities to track global biodiversity trends, assess the impact of climate change, and inform conservation efforts. A restoration and digitisation project to upgrade and safeguard the herbarium in Trinity College Dublin (TCD) was announced today (8 March) by Minister of State for Heritage and Electoral Reform Malcolm Noonan, TD. The funding of €1.5m will provide state-of-the-art physical infrastructure and enable the digitisation of the herbarium’s 400,000 plant specimens and books to protect them and to ensure they are accessible to the international research community. “I am delighted to be able to support this project via a very significant funding contribution through the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS),” Minister Noonan said. The curator of the herbarium, Prof Trevor Hodkinson, said that it “has one of the largest collections of plant specimens in Ireland”. “Together with our unique collection of books, some of which are more than 500 years old, our specimens provide a detailed record of Ireland’s natural history and contribute to our knowledge of the world’s biodiversity.”
From humble beginnings in the early 18th century when Sir Hans Sloane presented TCD with a ‘thick folio’ of dried plant specimens, to physician and botanist Thomas Coulter’s collection of 20,000 specimens in 1835, to the present day as one of the largest university herbaria in the world, the herbarium contains irreplaceable scientific information that allows researchers to track global biodiversity trends, assess the impact of climate change, and inform conservation efforts. “At Trinity we are committed to addressing the biodiversity and climate crises by delivering cutting edge research that informs policy and practice, and embeds these issues in the curriculum, preparing future generations of leaders,” said Prof Jane Stout, TCD vice-president for biodiversity and climate action sustainability. The herbarium contains a variety of samples from Australia, North America, Mexico, South Africa and Thailand. It includes specimens collected by early Irish botanist Ellen Hutchins and by Charles Darwin. TCD is co-funding the project by supporting three fully funded PhD positions in Irish biodiversity, which will be co-designed with the NPWS. Director of nature conservation at the NPWS Ciara Carberry said: “The partnership between the college and the NPWS will set the restoration and digitisation project on a sustainable footing and make sure the herbarium can be enjoyed by generations of students and scientists to come.”
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Historic Trinity herbarium to grow with €1.5m government funding

IBM (NYSE: IBM) manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and offers infrastructure services, hosting services, and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. The company was founded in 1911 and is based in Armonk, Newyork.

Juan Bernabe-Moreno , Director of IBM , Ireland said : `` This agreement reinforces the close partnership between IBM and Trinity College Dublin Dublin including research in accelerated discovery , and an intent to extend our pre-PhD programme to help pursue a joint research agenda to tackle some of the world 's biggest challenges .

Trinity and IBM strengthen collaborative research and education links

Electricity Supply Board (ESB) was established in 1927 as a statutory corporation in the Republic of Ireland under the Electricity (Supply) Act 1927. ESB operates right across the electricity market: from generation, through transmission and distribution to supply. In addition, we extract further value at certain points along this chain: supplying gas, using our networks to carry fibre for telecommunications, developing public charging infrastructure and more.

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`` The research conducted on this project will be led by the Trinity in partnership with the ESB and the micro-mobility providers .

Trinity partners with ESB in new pilot e-bike project in Dublin suburbs - News & Events

Artelo Biosciences is a biopharmaceutical company dedicated to applying biopharma discipline in leveraging past research and science to accelerate the development and commercialization of a diverse portfolio of endocannabinoid system modulating therapeutics.

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Artelo Biosciences Chief Science Officer and Trinity College Dublin are expanding their collaboration to study the cell biology of Fatty Acid Binding Protein inhibition in cancer .

Pharma Tech Outlook | Friday, April 15, 2022.
Artelo Enters Second Collaboration With Trinity College Dublin For Tumor Treatments.

Tangent is a creative technology agency that supports the clients with content marketing, UI/UX design, web development and web design.

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HSE Digital Transformation provides digital health solutions. It supports people's health journey from hospitals, to the community and home and helps in medical cost management. The company was founded in 2019 and is based in Dublin 8, Ireland.

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Vincent Wade	IBM	Chief Executive Officer	Former
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