Supreme Court ruling clears way for hundreds of drink-driving cases at Letterkenny court - Donegal News

Supreme Court backs State on drink-driving law

Hundreds of drink-driving cases that had been stalled at Letterkenny District Court are expected to proceed following a landmark Supreme Court ruling in Dublin on Thursday. The ruling overturned a decision which had previously thrown prosecutions nationwide into doubt.

The case centred on Latvian national Andrejs Ratinskis, whose drink-driving conviction was quashed by the High Court in 2025 after Ms Justice Sara Phelan found Gardaí had failed to prove the chain of custody of a blood sample between the time it was taken and when it was posted to the Medical Bureau of Road Safety (MBRS).

That ruling had sweeping consequences. Thousands of drink-driving prosecutions each year rely on blood or urine samples analysed by the MBRS. A very large number of cases nationwide, including over 300 at Letterkenny District Court, were adjourned while the Supreme Court considered the State’s appeal.

The Supreme Court has now ruled in favour of the Director of Public Prosecutions, restoring the long-standing position that prosecutors can rely on the statutory certification system unless there is specific evidence a sample was interfered with or compromised.

In practical terms, the ruling means Gardaí are no longer required to call additional witnesses to account for every stage of a sample’s storage and movement between collection and posting to the MBRS. Defendants cannot now challenge prosecutions solely on the basis that such detail was absent from Garda evidence.

The decision is expected to clear the backlog of adjourned cases at Letterkenny and courts across the country, though the full written judgment will determine precisely how the ruling is applied to pending cases.

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