Two people have been arrested as part of a perjury investigation stemming from the civil case taken against former MMA fighter Conor McGregor for rape.
Last year, Mr McGregor was ordered to pay Nikita Hand €250,000 damages after a High Court jury found he had assaulted her in a Dublin hotel.
In July, he lost his appeal against the jury finding in favour of Ms Hand, who sued him for alleged rape at the Beacon hotel on December 9th, 2018.
During his appeal, Mr McGregor, who is currently seeking a nomination to run for the Irish presidency, sought to introduce new evidence that his legal team said would call into question key aspects of Ms Hand’s testimony, including how she sustained serious injuries that night.
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It included sworn statements by Samantha O’Reilly and her partner Steven Cummins, who lived across the road from Ms Hand in Drimnagh, Dublin, for a time.
Ms O’Reilly claimed that from a room in her house, she heard and saw what appeared to be a physical altercation between Ms Hand and her then partner, Stephen Redmond, on the night of December 9/10th, 2018.
That evidence, Mr McGregor claimed, bolstered his insistence he was not responsible for extensive bruising on the body of Ms Hand, noted by a doctor on December 10th, 2018.
In a replying affidavit, Ms Hand described the neighbours’ claims as “lies” and said Mr Redmond never assaulted her during their relationship.
However, the evidence was unexpectedly withdrawn by Mr McGregor’s legal team on the morning of the appeal.
Ms Hand’s lawyers subsequently applied to have the matter referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) for consideration of possible perjury, including possible induced perjury by Mr McGregor.
The DPP then directed the Garda to conduct an investigation. Officers from the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation (NBCI) have been leading the investigation.
On Thursday, NBCI investigators arrested a man and woman, both aged in their 30s, as part of their investigations, a Garda spokesman said.
The arrest took place early on Thursday morning.
The pair are being held in a Dublin Garda station for the purposes of interview and can be questioned for 24 hours. “Investigations are ongoing,” the spokesman said.
Perjury investigations are rare and prosecutions are rarer still. Just one prosecution has been taken to date under the Criminal Justice (Perjury and Related Offences) Act 2021, which made perjury a criminal offence.
The DPP has brought five prosecutions for perjury, including under the 2021 Act, over the past decade. Before the 2021 Act, perjury offences were prosecuted under common law.
Of the five prosecutions since 2015, three resulted in a conviction, one in a decision not to prosecute further because the suspect had died and one is outstanding.
