Abigail Rieley

Today Dermot Ahern published the Criminal Justice (Amendment) Bill 2009.  It’s the latest in a series of changes to criminal justice laws here in Ireland that have been published in the last couple of weeks.

Last month the minister published the Criminal Procedure Bill 2009 with removes the Double Jeopardy rule, under which a person cannot be tried twice for an offence for which they have been acquitted.  Under the proposed legislation there will be three exceptions to the rule; where new evidence becomes available, where a trial was “tainted” by intimidation of witnesses and perjury and where a judge gave a mistaken ruling on a point of law which subsequently led to an acquittal.

It’ll be very interesting to see if any familiar faces appear again in court if this legislation is passed.  There have been a couple of high profile murder acquittals in the past couple of years which I’m sure the gardai and the DPP would love to revisit if they can.

Today’s publication deals with another highly contentious issue - that of organised crime.  With gang violence a major problem in modern Ireland, gangland murder trials have become a fairly common occurrence.  You can always tell when there’s one coming up on a Monday morning because Court 1 suddenly has a garda checkpoint outside it and everyone’s bags are checked and pockets emptied.

Defendants like Gary Campion, convicted in April of the murder of “Fat” Frankie Ryan.  Campion is connected with the Dundon McCarthy gang in Limerick and was convicted in November 2007 of the murder of bouncer Brian Fitzgerald. Both these trials took place in Cloverhill Courthouse, a court where increased security is easier to arrange than in the historic Four Courts complex.

Under the new bill, which the Minister hopes to get passed into law before the Dail rises for the summer, those accused of gang crime, where there was a major problem with witnesses or juries being intimidated, could be tried by judge alone in the Special Criminal Court.

At the moment, the Special Criminal Court is reserved for paramilitary or terrorist crimes.  The idea of extending it’s use to include those involved in criminal gangs is not a new one.  Previous justice minister Michael McDowell had mooted it and there have been one or two of these cases tried there already.

In 1996, Brian Meehan, the only person tried for the murder of journalist Veronica Guerin, was convicted to life in the Special Criminal Court.   But there has always been a lot of opposition to the idea on the basis of civil liberties.  Almost as soon as it was published the Irish Council for Civil Liberties accused the bill of “trampling on the rule of law“.

I’ve heard arguments on both sides for the use of the Special Criminal.  I must admit though that when you’ve sat through a trial where witness after witness will barely admit to their name on the stand or changes their story at the last minute it’s easy to see the sense in a trial where gardai will be permitted to give evidence of what was claimed in these cases.  After all, is there that big a difference between some of the trials that have gone through the Special for those members of an “illegal organisation” and the facts of some of the cases that now take place under the gangland banner.

I remember being taught about the Diplock courts when I studied in Northern Ireland.  We were told that all offences that involved firearms were treated as “scheduled offences” and could be tried in the Diplocks.

I’m sure that we’ll hear all the arguments for and against the changes in the law when the legislation is debated in the next few weeks.  It’ll be a very interesting one to keep an eye on.

All this week I’ve been working through a paper edit of The Novel.  The next stage is to add all the changes into the actual document and write a few extra bits and pieces that need to be worked in.  I’ve been working pretty intensively, far faster than I would have if I was writing a draft or actually typing up changes.  It means that I’ve been totally zoned out for the whole week.  I resurfaced long enough to notice that Michael Jackson had died, at some stage last night but apart from that…

Because I’ve been working with a hard copy of The Novel I haven’t been on-line much at all for the past few days, with the result that this blog has suffered somewhat.  I didn’t, for example comment on Wednesday about Monica Leech being awarded record libel damages against the Evening Herald.

For any readers not familiar with the story, Ms Leech is a PR woman who worked in an extremely well paid capacity for the Department of the Environment.  This was back in 2002 and 2003, when the Government purse strings were not quite so tightly knotted.  Things blew up in 2004 when several papers printed articles suggesting that she had only got the contract because she was having an affair with the then Minister.

There have been several libel actions in the wake of these claims.    In 2007 she won €250,000 after allegations against her her voiced by a caller to the Liveline show on RTE radio.  She failed to successfully sue the Irish Independent for printing the allegations from the show.  Last November she was awarded €125,000 against the Irish Mail and the Mail on Sunday.

This week was the daddy of all awards.  A High Court jury awarded her…wait for it…€1.9 million against the Evening Herald.

Now in Ireland, a jury in a libel trial can name a figure they think should be awarded to the complainant.  It’s not like the UK, where the judge gives them a ball park figure and they make their decision around that.

Being accused of having an affair in the national press might be a deeply traumatic experience, especially if it’s not true but is the damage worse than, say, someone who has been paralysed in a horrific car accident, or someone disabled for life after a problem at their birth?  With the proceeds from her various actions Ms Leech now has enough money to avoid the media spotlight for quite a while should she choose to.

€1.9 million is an extremely large figure and one can’t help see it as highly punitive rather than simply a reparation for harm caused.  There has been a lot of comment this week about the size of the award and what it means for the Irish media.

It does seem ridiculous that in a criminal trial a judge imposing a sentence for a crime that does not automatically carry a life sentence must come up with the term according to strict guidelines.  Each sentence must be decided along a sliding scale of seriousness within the definition of the offence.  The judge must arrive at a figure then take into account any mitigating circumstances that would lessen the term.  If he doesn’t arrive at a sentence this way there is a pretty good chance it will simply be overturned on appeal.

However, a libel judge doesn’t have any sliding scale.  There may well be one but he doesn’t share it with the jury who are sitting in judgement.  So twelve people who have probably never set foot in a court of law before are allowed to come to a decision unfettered by any rules or case law.

I’ve written in the past here about some of the bizarre things juries can get up to.  I’ve seen them fail to reach a unanimous decision when both sides of barristers were in absolute agreement (a case of not guilty of murder by reason of insanity for a classic paranoid schizophrenic).  There have been numerous occasions when a verdict has come as a shock and I’ve wondered if I was sitting in the same trial as those twelve.

Yet this unpredictable beast is let loose when it comes to civil damages.  All their prejudices against the media are left to run riot when they are not allowed to when a person’s liberty is at stake.  I know that a jail term is different from a fine and a criminal trial is very different from a civil one but a jury is a jury.

I’m not saying that Monica Leech wasn’t wronged against or that certain sectors of the press might have pushed the story further than they should but lottery sized libel wins don’t help.  They just weaken the press.  Stories that need to be reported go uncommented on.  The threat of such massive payouts will frighten papers into inaction.

Any country needs a strong press.  Of course it should be an ethical press but it shouldn’t be afraid to pursue stories that might upset the great and good.  Because sometimes the great and good are doing things to the public detriment.  That’s what the press are for…and there’s been plenty of evidence in Ireland how much we need one like that.

I’ve not been in court for the past week or so.  Instead I’ve been working on The Novel.  At the moment I’m reading through a hard copy of the manuscript and editing in preparation for a full rewrite.  In practice this means my days involve not moving from whatever spot I park myself in the morning with occasion burst of movement to get food, water or any other basic need.

My days are counted in pages and chapters and my grasp on reality is, for the moment, slightly less than firm.

This morning I was on my way into town for groceries when I bumped into a colleague from the courts.  It feels like I’ve been away for months, even though it’s only been a week or so.

In my moments of resurfacing into the real world I’ve been watching the ongoing controversy of the judges’ pay cuts.  For any non Irish readers let me explain.  The Irish economy is rather bolloxed at the moment as you may have heard.  We’ve gone from being the poster child of economic boom to an illustration of how not to do things.  We have crashed and burned quite spectacularly since the new year.

The government desperately needs to save money to try and keep some kind of check on a spiralling deficit.  Consequently they are trying to persuade all public sector workers to agree to pay cuts and stop being such a strain on the national purse strings.

Now it would be easy to imagine that the Irish economy is almost entirely propped up by public sector workers who have job security the rest of us can only dream of, the strongest unions in the country and a bench marking process that was supposed to protect them from being worse paid than the private sector but has in many areas led to them being paid a lot more.  But this isn’t a post about public sector workers or rather it is about one particular kind of public sector workers.

Judges do not have to take a pay cut.  It’s in the constitution that they can’t be forced to.  So the government have asked them to make a voluntary cut…a move which has so far proved a not particularly popular option.

I can see why people are so upset about the failure of 129 out of the countries 148 judges to volunteer for the cut.  In a climate where there’s more bad news every day then the reluctance of a group who individually earn between €170,000 and €290,000 a year to make a gesture of solidarity is going to stick in most gullets.

But I can also see why they have constitutional protection in the first place.  Judges need to be impartial and should not be in a position where they are tempted to make political decisions based on financial, or other, pressure.  Justice should be impartial and it’s right that there should be some form of constitutional  protection for that.  The pay protection is there for the same reason as the protection from prosecution…because judges should not be vulnerable to any form of pressure when they are trying a case.

Now before everyone jumps on me I know that judges are human beings like the rest of us and are still public servants.  It might be easy to forget that when you see them sailing through the corridors of the Four Courts preceded by their tipstaff carrying an impressive staff to announce their presence.

I know a lot of people would like to see an end to that kind of pomp and circumstance but for the moment that’s the way things are and that’s an argument for another day.  It’ll be interesting to see how this one pans out.  I’ll be watching with interest.

Today, June 16th, was Bloomsday.  If you’re not familiar with the concept, June 16th 1904 is the day when all the action in James Joyce’s opus, Ulysses is set.  Every year on that day the great and good and literary and arty gather in Dublin to retrace the route taken by Leopold Bloom on a Sunday morning at the turn of the last century.

Joyce’s book has been heralded as a classic, a work of English unparalleled in the English language.  That’s why he gets his own day.

Now this is probably the point where I should come clean.  I hate Bloomsday.  I’ve lived in Dublin too long not to get profoundly irritated by the marauding crowds of arty types and tourists that clutter up the thoroughfares with glasses of Guinness and dressed up to the nines in approximations of Edwardian dress.  If you wander through the centre of Dublin on June 16th you will find a selection of middle aged idiots acting like undergraduates and giving the book that is on more peoples “haven’t quite got round to reading” list than most others I can think of, the Rocky Horror treatment.

Let me get this straight.  Bloomsday is not just a bit of harmless playacting, it’s irritating, embarrassing and teeth clenchingly awful!  It’s the one day of the year when you get to see people who really should have more self respect, dressing up like complete idiots and hitting the bars like a back of feckless 20 somethings.

I’m aware that by saying this I sound (a) a total ignoramous and (b) rather unsure about where I fall in the whole cool young thing and old fogey scale.  For starters I have read Ulysses.  I read it years ago when I first moved up to Dublin while I was devouring anything that came from the writers that had helped to make the city famous.  I was fairly voracious in my reading in those days and didn’t always check the postal address of my chosen read.

In those days I read Sean O’Casey, Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, Oscar Wilde, and George Bernard Shaw…I’m not sure why I didn’t get round to Behan…I think I got side tracked by Lewis Carroll.  Anyway, at the time I was working on an antique stall in the George’s Street Arcade.

My boss at the time was working on a book of postcards all sent on June 16th 1904, that corresponded with the various locations in the book.  He’d written a synopsis of the book to go with the images and, knowing that 19-year-old me was keen on writing, he asked me to check it, casually throwing me a copy of Ulysses to make sure he hadn’t left anything out.

So I read Ulysses.  From cover to cover.  I quite liked Leopold Bloom but preferred his wife Molly and couldn’t stand Stephen Dedalus, who I thought and continued to think was a pretentious little git.  In terms of Joyce’s prose, while I get what he was doing from a technical point of view, it just completely leaves me cold.

I will freely admit that this could have to do with the never ending stream of postcards or my bosses synopsis but Ulysses would not appear anywhere on my list of books I would want with me if I was ever marooned on a desert island and I would be quite pissed off if it found it’s way there ahead of me.

I know that Ulysses is held up as a work of genius.  I just don’t like it.  I’m not denigrating Joyce as a writer in any way…The Dead is one of the best shorter pieces of writing I have ever read.  I just don’t like Ulysses.  I don’t like the fact that the men run the plot while the women are either leched over virgins, prostitutes or adulteresses.  I don’t like the fact that the book that is now synonymous with Dublin is arguably the least accessible.  I don’t like the fact that Bloomsday itself tends to be a rather snobby affair with pantomime overtones.

Dublin has produced many fine writers;  Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan, Oscar Wilde, Sean O’Casey, Flann O’Brien, George Bernard Shaw.  Writers who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, writers who deserve to be celebrated each year but who only get a look in for centenaries or on whims.

So I say, let’s give Bloomsday a rest.  Next year let’s have At Swim Two Birds Day to celebrate Flann O’Brien’s lunatic masterpiece.  The day could start in Grogans Pub off Georges Street and there could be cowboys in Ringsend, someone sitting up a tree proclaiming that a “pint of plain’s yer only man”, come to thing of that could the the city’s clarion call.  We could have someone dressed up as the Pooka MacPhellimey and someone or something as Finn Mac Cool.

Instead of having a day where the middle classes dress up in straw boaters and give the day over to cataloguing the eating and drinking in Joyce’s novel, lets have one where the surreal and bizzarre takes over the city. Instead of a daytrip to Sandeymount and Grafton Street, lets see the cattle corralled in Ringsend.

It might actually work.  And it would be a lot less irritating that bloody Bloomsday.

I was expecting to be writing tonight about the first day of the trial of Thomas Barrett but it’s been put off to a later date so I’m left with a quandary about what to write.

I doubt if anyone out there would be interested in my quest to find the cat a suitable comb to get rid of the prodigious amounts of hair she’s leaving anywhere within a two mile radius at the moment (although I must admit I did tweet about that this afternoon - I’m not usually that inane honestly).

Normally when I check in on my blog the first thing I do is check my stats.  I’m endlessly fascinated by what brings people here and if and why they come back.  Surprisingly not everyone seems to be a true crime buff since that’s my main topic of conversation here.  The search results that have brought people to this blog can be bizarre at the best of times but are often illuminating.

Today for example they gave me an idea about what to write about.  I’d forgotten about the strange lights over Dublin one last night week…until I saw that several people had arrived looking for information into just that.

Now I can’t offer any information.  They were strange lights all right.  Both myself and the husband saw them and watched them for several minutes until they very suddenly disappeared.  At 12.50 a.m on June 12th I sent the first tweet below.

1. 
   abigailrieley Ok that was weird. Sitting watching a late film & both myself & @Aperture11 saw 2 strange lights in the sky. Which then disappeared! 11 Jun 2009 from Twittix
2. 
   abigailrieley They were very bright, one directly on top of the other & perfectly still. Over central Dublin. Now gone! Very odd indeed! 11 Jun 2009 from Twittix
3. 
   abigailrieley But seriously why would UFO’s target the north inner city of Dublin? Seriously? 11 Jun 2009 from m.slandr.net

— this quote was brought to you by quoteurl

I didn’t get any replies (well it was rather late) so I don’t know if anyone else saw them but I’m guessing from the search terms people used to find this blog we weren’t the only ones who did after all.  If anyone out there knows where the lights were some kind of weather balloon, military test, over-zealous night club lighting or anything with a rational explanation, please let me know.

Maybe there’s a reason, maybe it’s just one of those totally random things that occasionally happen in Dublin.  If you know what they were, or if I find out anything more, I’ll update this post and put everyone’s minds at rest that there is no alien invasion…unless…

Tomorrow it’s back to work after a couple of weeks off that gave me a taste of a possible summer to come.  As I’ve already said here I’m planning to finish my first novel over the summer break from the courts and I’m looking forward to the different pace that working on fiction requires.

Tomorrow though it’s back to the Monday List.  The trial I’ll be there for is Thomas Barrett, from Kerry.  He’s accused of killing father and son, Michael and Denis Hanrahan.  60-year-old Mr Hanrahan and 27-year-old Denis were found shot dead at their home in Moyvane, Co Kerry in March last year.

It’s a case I’ve been hearing about since it happened (given my line of work I tend to keep tabs on murder investigations - it doesn’t tend to endear you too people at dinner parties!).  Over the past year, I’ve heard various rumours - working somewhere with a mix of journalists, barristers and gardai you hear all sorts of gossip about things that might concern any of us in the future and during the prolonged periods of waiting that are part of the judicial process gossip has a habit of spreading.

None of it’s more than gossip of course until the day the trial starts and we hear the opening speech from the prosecution where they outline their case.  So tomorrow I’ll find out if the case is going to go ahead as planned and how long it’s going to last, also how big a story it’s likely to be.

So tomorrow is the moment of truth and I’ll find out whether I’m working for a few days, a week or even a fortnight.  Tonight I’m just waiting and changing gear again.  The lazy mornings with the manuscript and a red pen  in the back garden will have to be postponed for the moment.  It’s back to the day job.

I’ve been off work for the past week and a half…engaged with other things than court matters (a wedding anniversary among other things) but I was back in court this morning briefly.  The Central Criminal Court isn’t fully back from it’s break until next Monday but there are various bits of court business to take care of in the mean time.

Today, and the reason for my attendance was Eamonn Lillis.  If the name doesn’t ring an immediate bell and you’re in Ireland I’ll refresh your mind about the case.  Lillis’s wife, Celine Cawley - a former model who had once appeared briefly in a James Bond Film - was found brutally murdered in December last year.

It was a case always guaranteed to get the press pulses racing…apart from the Bond connection the deceased had run a film production company together.  Newspaper reports at the time went into detail of the crime and her background almost gleefully speculating that she had met her death at the hands of a random assailant.

But days later, her husband was arrested and will now stand trial in January.  It will be a big trial and get a lot of attention.  These cases always do.  Already today, his defence team expressed their concern about the media attention the case was receiving. There were only four of us in court - when the trial begins there will be considerably more.

Lillis came into court looking serious in a neat dark suit.  During the short proceedings he sat alert in the bench opposite the jury box, where he will watch his trial in several months time. Before the defence could make their point the prosecution stood up to apply for a court order.

The order was simple, Eamonn Lillis was forbidden from any contact with one of the prosecution witnesses in the case.  The matter was over in a matter of minutes.  The order granted to the prosecution, no comment made on the media attention.

It’s all in waiting until next year when it will become the main event.  These are just the points that get us there.

Thousands of people took to the streets of Dublin today to show their outrage at the abuse meted out by the Catholic Church in institutions over the years.  Once the crowds had assembled outside Leinster House where the politicians were arguing about the worth of the Government, stories were told of how the abuse wrecked lives and calls were made for belated justice.

I’m ashamed to say I wasn’t with the marchers.  The husband was, that’s his photograph at the top of this post.  I was working on editing the book, sitting in a favourite hideaway where I can work in the centre of town in peace and quite.  This afternoon there was another sound that drowned out the buzzing of the bees, from Kildare Street a good ten minutes walk away I could hear the speakers at the march.  Their voices carried through megaphones, bounced between buildings, came through the air in a strange ebbing echo, fragments of their stories reaching me on the wind while the shouts of the massive crowd were only a murmur.  This is as it should be.  Their stories should ring out across town and the whole country should hang their heads in shame at the hurt and harm that so many children and pregnant women had to undergo at the hands of a too powerful church.

The first time I personally became aware of the scale of the abuse was when my mother was cast as the head nun in Louis Lentin’s 1996 documentary Dear Daughter.  She was staying with me while the series was filmed and told me about visiting the old Golden Bridge orphanage with some of the women who had suffered so horrifically there.  One of them, Christine Buckley, whose story Dear Daughter followed, is in the photograph above, in the front row of protesters.

My mother told me about the first day of filming, when she was in her nun’s costume for the first time.  She got ready for her entrance at the top of a flight of stairs.  The women who had once been inmates of that grim place were standing in the hall below watching the shot.  She told me that as she came down the stairs as Sister Xavieria, the woman who had been in charge of Goldenbridge in the 1950s, the women all gasped and became visibly upset.  The similarity was far too great, the memories too vivid.

Dear Daughter came three years before the infamous States of Fear series which detailed the abuse suffered by the children who had been sent to the infamous industrial schools.  It told of horrendous abuse perpetrated by the Sisters of Mercy nuns on the children in their care.

But now 13 years later we are still being shocked at the details of that abuse.  Every time there is another report further details of the cruel, sick, inhumane treatment suffered by some of the most vulnerable citizens of this country, come out and the people react with horror, as they should.  But in those thirteen years very little progress has been made.  The story just keep getting bigger and bigger, with more and more victims hurt by a church that should never have been allowed to have such a stranglehold on the country as a whole.

When the Ferns Report was published, detailing more than 100 allegations of child abuse in a single diocese, the same noises were made and the same outrage expressed.  Now we have the Ryan Report which goes into institutional abuse across the whole country but still there is a lack of decisive action on the part of the Government.  How many abusers are still walking free and how many victims still waiting for closure and justice?

The fact that one organisation, the Catholic church, was so twisted and corrupt as to allow and condone such wholesale abuse of the people in their care, is horrifying.  The fact that the State still seems to show deference to the religious rather than ordering them to face up fully to what they have done, is even worse.  There is something very, very wrong with a country in which a slavish subservience to those in power means blind eyes will be turned to whatever abuses the powerful ones choose to get up to.  Whether you are talking about the religious orders who had care of the countries children or the likes of Dr Michael Shine, struck off last year for abusing youngsters, there are those who will gather round them protectively, looking up to the priest or the doctor in adoration and hearing no ill.

Surely it’s time that justice was finally doles out?  There is no excuse, no mitigation to what these people did.  The laws of the land still apply.  But instead of being cast out, the religious are treated as a special case.  They were handed a ludicrously sweet deal when it came to compensating their victims and the news that they are to cough up more is greeted as if they are doing the country some kind of favour.

It can only be hoped that the voices raised this afternoon were heard and a change in attitude takes place.  But going on past evidence it’s going to take a lot more marches before anything changes.

Over the weekend Ireland bucked the trend throughout Europe and went to the left instead of the right when voting in the European elections.  Having got rather used to being permanently embarrassed and frustrated by the almost Thatcherite tendencies repeatedly shown by two successive Fianna Fail / PD coalitions and there having been bugger all in the way of change since the PDs imploded and Fianna Fail got into bed with a mixture of Greens and Independents, the results came as a pleasant surprise.

I remember being thoroughly depressed in France in 1998 (I was studying there at the time) when a news report called Ireland one of only three right wing states in the EU.  Of course a lot has changed in the last eleven years.  The Celtic Tiger has roared, scratched the furniture and finally slunk off taking a lot of what made Ireland a nice place to live with it.  We’re now pretty much where we started but at least this weekend we moved a step in the right direction.

While the rest of Europe stayed away from the polling stations, allowing the right and centre right to claim victories all over the place, here in Ireland we voted in higher numbers than usual and used the three votes at our disposal to show a resounding two fingers to the ruling parties.  Fianna Fail have been well and truly trounced and the Greens have been decimated.  After impressive gains in the local elections Fine Gael are the largest party in the State for the first time in 80 years (that’s pretty much the entire time the state has been in existence) and Labour are the biggest party in the capital.

In the small hours of this morning Joe Higgins, the Socialist Party activist and politician succeeded in shunting Fianna Fail’s Eoin Ryan out of his Euro seat and claiming it for himself.  It’s a marked contrast to the UK where this afternoon and evening there are demonstrations taking place across England in protest at the victory of two British National Party (far-right nationalists as the name suggests) Euro candidates.

I’ve watched the coverage of the last three general elections here in Ireland feeling increasingly frustrated at my fellow voters as again and again Fianna Fail sailed to victory even though the warning signs that what they were doing with the economy was not the best long term plan were there for all to see.  It might have taken over a decade and a global economic crash for the people to vote for an alternative but better late than never.

It remains to be seen whether a general election would get the same result but there’s a vote of no confidence in the government tomorrow so there’s a chance we’ll find out sooner rather than later.

If you’ve worked as a journalist and ever covered an election count with all the boredom and rushes of excitement and pandemonium it’s hard not to get the politics bug.  Yesterday’s elections in Ireland have today provided some of the most interesting counts in years and then there’s the added ghoulish fascination with watching the Government parties take heavy hits.

I’m not working today, it’s been a while since I’ve been on the general news beat and so in line to get sent to a count centre but these days the Net provides so many ways to follow proceedings that you can have the information pretty much as soon as it’s felt on the count centre floor.  It’s at times like these that the immediacy of the social web and the speed and ease that information can now be transmitted and received really come into their own.

I’m a big fan of Twitter.  I’ve tweeted updates of trials I’ve followed in the past and have long been fascinated by the possibilities of the service as way of getting news.  Twitter has hit the headlines in the past when news of major events has spread like wildfire through the community, beating conventional news outlets.  The Mumbai attacks and the Hudson River plane crash were two cases in point and both garnered the site international press attention.

Today, watching the steady stream of chatter from Irish twitterers around the country, was like a virtual equivalent of covering a count.  You’re hearing the chatter, the gossip and the early tallys as well as the comments and the jokes.  Quite a different experience to watching the coverage on TV or listening to the radio.  Of course it helps that Irish twitters are a  media savvy lot and are passionate about what’s going on today.  This election was always going to get people interested with Government approval ratings plummeting and job losses hitting record highs every month.

I watch a lot of media types and bloggers so a fair few were down in the count centres which added to the atmosphere but this really was a day when Twitter came into it’s own.  These days Twitter is often my first port of call when I want to see how a story is developing, maybe it’s because it’s like having access to a wire service at home, but also because I know I can shout out a question and chances are someone will come back with the answer quicker than I could find it through more conventional means.  A day like today is absolutely ideal to see these strengths in action.

All over the country people were tweeting from count centres, giving updates often before they were available through the conventional media.

1. 
   christinebohan Joe Higgins just elected to Fingal with a surplus of over one thousand #le09 06 Jun 2009 from mobile web
2. 
   Tupp_Ed RDS awash with Labour, triumphant. Other parties circumspect. #le09 06 Jun 2009 from mobile web
3. 
   suzybie Fine Gael to move motion of no confidence in government next week #le09 06 Jun 2009 from TweetDeck
4. 
   EmilyTully Pat the Cope Gallagher: “Its been a bad day for FF - we expected that” #le09 06 Jun 2009 from twhirl

— this quote was brought to you by quoteurl

This is the first time I’ve monitored a story like this entirely online.  I’ve been streaming Newstalk 106’s coverage which was excellent, and available after RTE radio had switched their attention to sport.  They had live coverage from the RDS count centre (the main centre in Dublin) with reports from around the country at regular intervals.  For a station with far smaller resources than RTE they really mobilised well and provided great coverage.

Irishelection.com also provided excellent coverage from the count centres with a live blog of election results which again rivalled the coverage provided by RTE.  It’s great to see online news services providing such great coverage of something like this - it opens up so many possibilities.

In previous elections the only constant coverage would have been RTE television, which is always excellent but it’s only one view.  Being able to follow so many different viewpoints gives a far rounder idea of what’s going on and if you’re slightly obsessive like me, it makes for a fascinating afternoon.

This election has been the first one that can truly be said to have been fought online.  During the campaign candidate after candidate took a leaf out of Obama’s book and fought the fight through Twitter and Facebook.  The list of Irish politicians on Twitter exploded with names like Joe Higgins, Ivana Bacik, Proinsias De Rossa and Eoin Ryan all seeking to woo the twitterverse.  Many of them also courted the Facebook generation with hastily elected pages once the fight had begun.

It seems fitting that their success or demise should be so comprehensively examined in the same places they sought to kiss virtual babies and press virtual flesh.  Certainly from now on the way elections are covered will never be the same.  The traditional Irish media might have been wary of  new fangled social networking in the past but it has finally come of age in Ireland.  This election, new media arguably beat old media when it came to rapidly getting news out there.  Irish election coverage was all the better for it.