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A 43-YEAR-OLD man who illegally returned to the UK in order to care for his sick wife has received a suspended prison sentence.
Robert Dani, of Gillygooley Road, Omagh, was charged with being a person who was not a British citizen who knowingly entered the UK in breach of a Deportation Order on an unknown date prior to August 11, 2022.
Appearing before Strabane Magistrates Court last Thursday via videolink from Antrim custody suite, Dani entered a guilty plea to the charge.
The court heard that the defendant had been deported from the UK in 2015 after serving a prison sentence in England.
But, in the intervening years, his wife and children had been residing in Northern Ireland for some time.
However, after his wife became seriously ill, Dani returned to the UK to care for her. The self-employed plasterer has been working in Monaghan while living in Omagh, the court heard.
Defending counsel, Seamas MacGiollaCheara, told the court that his client understood he shouldn’t be in the UK, but stressed there were “extenuating circumstances” in that his wife was very ill. The barrister urged the judge to suspend any prison sentence, adding that the Home Office would be initiating “alternative proceedings”.
When district judge John Connolly asked an immigration officer who attended the hearing if they planned to detain Dani, she replied, “We would bail him.”
The judge observed that, technically, the defendant was remaining in the UK unlawfully and he was still an “overstayer”.
He imposed a two-month jail term, which he then suspended for a year.