Category: Ireland (Page 5 of 13)

Abigail

According to yesterday’s Irish Times some census enumerators are advising people to fill in their religion as the one they were raised in rather than the beliefs they currently hold. On the Antiroom blog today author and journalist Anna Carey called for those with no formal religious beliefs to make their voices heard – it’s a call echoed by Atheist Ireland who, back in January, launched their Be Honest About Religion campaign asking for all those not practising a religion to tick the No Religion box on the census to give an accurate suggestion of how secular Irish society has become.

This is an issue I feel strongly about. It would never occur to me to answer anything other than No Religion. That’s been the case for as long as I can remember, apart from a brief flirtation with God when I was about ten. I grew up in a very secular environment – it was my choice to start going to church and my decision to get baptised then confirmed. I remember being shown a lovely silver goblet given to me for my christening when I was a baby, that had sat in it’s green leather box slowly tarnishing as the day never arrived. It seemed as if this elegant, shiny thing was never really mine because I’d never signed on the dotted line. I can’t say for certain whether this had any influence on my decision to start attending church but it never was engraved even when I finally did get baptised – about twenty minutes before I was confirmed at the age of 11.

For a few years I really got into it. I loved the ritual, the flowers and the way the light shone down through the stained glass windows in our modern church. I also liked the way it made me feel, virtuous and special. But it was always play acting for me. I loved the music of the hymns, the rhythm of the words of the prayers we recited each week, the cadence of the sung parts of the eucharist, but at no stage did I really have a concept of some superior being. When I heard the words Our Father I vaguely associated it with My Father, dead when I was a baby but always, so I was told, looking down on me.

So the issue of religion has never been a big one for me. I’ve tried, over the years, to believe in a variety of things but deep down I know that for me it would always be play acting. In England it was never a big deal. I didn’t know what religion most of my friends were and it never came up. But when we moved to Ireland all that changed. Religion runs through this country like veins of silica through rock and is just as impenetrable. I know that for my Irish friends the decision to say they have no religion usually means turning their backs on a deeply held faith that would have been followed unquestioningly before the doubts began.

Since I’ve moved here I’ve come to see how important belief can be but also how vital it is to respect the views of others. This is something that, on even on an official level, is not always done here.

A few years ago, in a different life, I was working as a consultant’s PA in a Dublin hospital. One day I was helping a patient with his hospital admission. The man had just been told he had terminal cancer and would probably not be leaving the hospital alive. I had got to know him over the months he had been coming to the hospital for tests. He was a lovely man, always quick with a joke and would always stop by my desk for a chat when he was leaving. This day he was quiet as we worked through the form and I filled in the necessary details. Towards the end of the form was a question on religion. Without missing a beat he answered None. This wasn’t an option so I left the section blank and moved on.

Leaving him sitting beside my desk I walked down the corridor to the admissions office, wanting to make the process as simple and painless as possible. The woman sitting at the admissions desk glanced at the form I handed her before handing it back. “You didn’t fill in the religion”. “He doesn’t have one” I answered, not thinking twice about it. “Take it back and get him to put something down – it has to be filled in before we can admit him.”

So I went back down the corridor clutching the form feeling slightly sick. I had to tell this terribly sick man that his beliefs, obviously strongly felt, weren’t good enough for the hospital administrators. I sat down beside him and explained it as lightly as I could but knew immediately I should have stayed and argued the toss at the admissions desk. The poor man was angry and upset. He was crying as he began to justify his decision to me, something he should never have felt he had to do.

I stopped him and said that I would sort it and eventually I did. It took a stand up row before they would admit him without a religion but eventually I was able to go back and tell him he could go up to the ward. The whole incident left me shaking with anger. That this lovely man should have been questioned like that, that I had to be the one to question him. For weeks after I argued that the option should be added to the admissions form, but I was only a temp and the hospital administration staff were on a work to rule over a benchmarking dispute. The issue wasn’t high on the agenda. Eventually I persuaded the IT guy to add an extra box to the form and started reading all the options to everyone coming to admission. Nobody else ticked the No Religion box but I would hope that next time they did it was accepted as an option.

I left the hospital not long after, a little bit more militant on a number of issues. But it was that day that has stuck with me ever since and the anger still rises when I think of it. I know that religion is part of the fabric of the State here but that has to change. Things might have improved since I was working in the hospital but as long as there is the assumption that everyone is the same, everyone has the same background, the same values if you scratch the civilised veneer with a sharp enough point, then that complacency will make some people feel like aliens in their own home. When that complacency strikes when people are at their most vulnerable then it becomes a cruelty.

I know there is pressure to conform. When I took the stand last week down in Dungarvan I felt embarrassed when I asked to affirm, even though any other oath would be a lie. I went to church for long enough as a child to feel awkward when everyone gets up for communion and I stay seated at the family milestones we gather to celebrate, all of them taking place in a Church.

The No Religion box on the current census form didn’t need to be asked for. But if those who don’t believe don’t tick it then it’s too easy to assume it’s not a problem. That not believing is just an aberration, a blip in the religious hegemony. It’s the times when we’re at our most vulnerable that feeling like an individual can be most important. But in those same times you shouldn’t be made to feel like an outsider.

Abigail

I’ve been spending most of my time recently lost in the past. At the moment I’m researching crimes from so far back they’re in another world. If you were accused of a crime back then there was no chance of a retrial and if you were convicted of murder then your fate dangled at the end of a rope, a ghoulish spectacle for day trippers.

Life was brutal, shorter, bleaker. Cholera and typhoid swept Britain and Ireland and infant mortality was high. I’m looking at a time when there was no such thing as universal suffrage, to vote in an election you had to have land, and be a man. Women belonged to their husbands, on the day of their marriage everything they owned passed to him, they could not divorce their husbands if he was unfaithful and on divorce they could lose even the right to their own children.

It’s like looking into another world. Now we can take for granted the right to vote and the position of the mother, given special protection in Article 41.2, is seen as so inalienable it can be to the detriment of the rights of the father. In a few short generations, women’s lives have changed utterly. We have more freedom, more of a voice, more opportunities than our grandmothers did, and even many more than our mothers’ generation.

But while there’s been incredible progress, the world we live in still has a very long way to go before there is true equality for the sexes. I work in a job where most of my colleagues are women but only to a certain level. Apart from one or two notable exceptions, the majority of judges in the courts, or editors in the newspapers are men. Most of the senior barristers are men and most of the senior gardai are men. It’s changing, of course, but for a large chunk of the rest of my working life that’s the way it’s going to be.

85% of the politicians who pass the laws that govern what goes on in the courts are men, which might possibly have something to do with the fact that sentences for sexual crimes are so pathetically low. Domestic abuse is still rife and women still die all too often at the hands of their partners. I still spend most of my time writing about this violence against women as it takes up so much of the courts’ time.

But this is the First World, the civilised bit. The inequalities I see around me are miniscule compared with those that women have to face in other parts of the globe. We’ve come a long way in a hundred years or so, but there’s a hell of a long way still to go. There are plenty of places on earth where women would recognise the strange world I’m finding in my research as pretty close to their own reality.

Yet I meet so many young women who see feminism as a dirty word and would be embarrassed to apply it to themselves. They see the race as won, the fight as fought, and simply accept the status quo as something that can’t be changed. For a long time I was more reticent about saying what I thought, not wanting to appear strident, or even, god forbid, unattractive. I’ve laughed along with sexist jokes for fear of being branded a kill joy. I’ve fluttered my eyelashes and bitten my tongue, pretending to be one of the lads. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve not got a problem with men. This has nothing to do with which gender is better, it’s about equality. And it’s important to say it.

It would be nice to live in a world where feminism was no longer necessary, where everyone played to their strengths and not their stereotypes. It would be nice if everyone judged everyone else according to who they actually were, not what they seemed to be. But that’s the foreign country and far more distant than my world of hangings, cholera and bridal chattels. That’s why International Women’s Day is still important a hundred years after it was started and why I’ll keep banging on about rape sentencing and women who die at the hands of the men who claim to love them.

Abigail

I went to Kilmainham Gaol last week and it got me thinking. There was one particular fact gleaned from the tour and a wander round the museum that stuck in my head. It was presented casually, in passing, intending to give an impression of what the prison was like in the dark days before prison reform, when the Famine had filled it’s walls to bursting point, a statistic to underline a point.

The fact was this, that in the mid 1800s 40% of prisoners at the gaol were women, compared to less than a quarter in gaols in England. The placidly informative board put this down to the fact that women in those days had less opportunities than their English counterparts, coming from a mainly rural society with less job prospects, with all the eligible men on the nearest boat away from the ravages of the Famine that had decimated the population in the 1840s. The only option for a lot of these impoverished, single women finding themselves on the mean streets of Dublin, was a life in prostitution.

The court cases reported at the time told a sad tale of degradation and extreme poverty. Infanticides were common among women who couldn’t see any other option. Those stories were dealt with quickly, written about without fuss, in maybe half a column of newsprint, sordid tragedies that didn’t really register on the public. Familiarity really does breed contempt, or at least a growing lack on interest.

That much hasn’t changed. While killing a child would guarantee headlines in these less desperate times there are other crimes that happen too often to guarantee many column inches. The bulk of the cases that pass through the Central Criminal Court, for example, would be rapes of some form or another. But you won’t see that reflected in your morning, or for that matter evening, paper. Rape cases are difficult to write up, strict laws to protect the privacy of both the victim and the accused are in place until a verdict, and in the case of incest, where identifying the accused would identify the victim, after it as well. Copy doesn’t read well when it’s peppered with indefinite articles and, no matter how skilled the writer, there really isn’t any other way of doing it.

So there are a lot of cases that are tried and convicted without any comment. It takes a crime of particular brutality, notoriety or sickness before the press bench will approach full capacity. It happens the most with the sex cases. When I was working for the agencies that send court stories out to all the newspapers the sheer torrent of similarities was one of the most shocking things about covering a rape case. The details in the opening speech of the latest child abuse case had a horribly familiar ring. The vulnerable child, singled out at and violated. The age the assaults would begin would often be similar, even the details of the molester’s patter and approach, and of course the devastation that would follow, the weight of a dirty secret, the sleepless nights – all the same, or similar.

In the end it was the familiarity that became most sickening – and so you won’t read about these cases with your morning coffee. It’s the same with murder. There have been headlines about the knife crime epidemic for the past couple of years but once again it’s the similarities between the cases that follow each other head to toe through the courts all year, that hit home. The waste of young lives, brought to an end so thoughtlessly when drink and drugs and sharp implements became a fatally volatile mix.

Walking round the museum in Kilmainham Gaol I was struck by how familiar it seemed. We’ve come a long way in the last 150 years but not far enough. There are still people who are desperate, who live lives that they feel have no real value, who will try to survive by whatever means they can when they struggle to keep their heads above water.

I was reminded in particular of Joselita da Silva. She was a victim rather than a culprit but at the trial of the man who stabbed her to death last month, an old story was hung out for the jury to peruse. They didn’t pay any attention and convicted Marcio Goncalves da Silva (no relation) of her murder.

The case didn’t get as much publicity as it might. It was around the time when the government crashed and burned so attention was elsewhere, but it may have been a story whose familiarity would have brought yawns from editors on all but the quietest news day. Joselita was Brazilian. She and her husband had moved to Ireland at the height of the boom, hoping to make enough money to go home and make a new life for themselves and the three children they had left behind.

But the Celtic Tiger didn’t treat Joselita very well. Her marriage had broken down soon after she arrived in the country and she soon found herself struggling to survive in the gold tinted wonderland that was Ireland before the bust. She found work doing various cleaning jobs, or working in fast food shops but the work wasn’t regular and it was hard to make ends meet.

Joselita was a bubbly, outgoing woman. She got on well with everyone but there were those who whispered that she was maybe too friendly with certain men. During da Silva’s trial the court heard about the married man whose wife had tried to have Joselita deported, or the local man, many years her senior, who had showered her with expensive gifts, a laptop, tickets home to Brazil, the subtext being that he had also bought Joselita, the old transaction, understood the world over. Ultimately it doesn’t matter what she did. She didn’t break any laws and was perfectly entitled to live her life how ever she chose. But her family were subjected to this tarnished picture of her, presented by the defence in an attempt to justify to some extent, da Silva’s actions, when he stabbed the woman he said he loved more than 40 times.

The defence always maintained that Marcio da Silva had not killed Joselita in a jealous rage, but it took the jury a few short hours to find him guilty of murder. But the image that stayed behind when the trial was finished was of an Ireland that hadn’t moved on as much as we would like to think. A land where all the glittering gold was really brass and the veneer of a kinder, more civilised society was paper thin. Sadly there are some things that will probably never really change. Until then the museum in Kilmainham Gaol will tell stories that trigger that horrible familiarity, rather than being a dead relic of a more brutal time.

Abigail

It’s been a grim week for Ireland but the dissenting voices are growing. Yes the government and the bankers have brought the country to their knees and thousands will flee to warmer more solvent countries but more and more people are saying why they will be staying.

Staying to see the worst through, to see the government fall, the economy collapse but staying because now there is a genuine opportunity to change. It started small a few days ago. A Twitter meme under the hashtag imnotleaving started to spread through the midday babble.

Then Deirdre O’Shaughnessy, editor of the Cork Independent wrote this on The Antiroom blog. Inspired by her words author Charlie Connelly, whose latest book Our Man in Hibernia details his first year in Ireland at the end of the boom wrote this.

Well at the risk of jumping on the bandwagon, I’m not leaving either. I moved to Ireland with my family more than 20 years ago. This is my home, where I really grew up and where I always come back to. I met my husband here, made a home here, got the opportunity to do what I always dreamed of doing here. I have dear friends, valued colleagues and a country and a way of life I love. This is my country now and there is no way in hell I’m leaving now.

Ireland has the capacity to be such an incredible country. There seem to be two dominant personality types here perennially fighting for the upper hand. There’s the brilliant, stubborn, creative, impossible bollox who can charm and infuriate in equal parts but has the capacity to really change the way people think. The great egalitarian, the one who will refuse to bow to anyone and whose attitude when their back is against the wall and the chips are down is “Ah Feck It”, a refusal to be beaten. This is the character that has brought so many Irish to the tops of their fields, that creates those flashes of brilliance, an ability to create new ways of thinking and to buck the trends.

Then there’s the other one. The sleeveen, the cute hoor. A character identified by a slavish obsequiousness, a blind assimilation of a set of ideas and values. This is the character of the middle manager, the combination of a lack of real ability and a ruthless ambition to feather their own nest. These two characters have appeared throughout Irish history. There were the free thinkers who could have built a shining new republic, and the priest ridden, conservatives who wanted nothing more than jobs for the boys.

We’ve allowed the sleeveen free reign for far too long. It’s time now for a new start with the better character. We need those flashes of brilliance, that lateral thinking, the guts, the drive and the creativity to raise Ireland up out of the mess it’s got itself into. It’s here. It never went away. I just hope people will realise that it’s not change that’s the scary thing, it’s staying with the status quo that got us into this mess. It’s time to see the best of the Irish. I’m going to be sticking around to see that happen.

Abigail

This Thursday, November 25th, is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. It marks the start of a global campaign of 16 Days of Action. Here in Ireland the campaign is being spearheaded by Women’s Aid with events running around the country.

Working in the courts you see the grim effects of this violence on a daily basis. Any regular readers of this blog will know my views on sentencing for sex crimes and on the men who murder the women they are supposed to love. There has to be a proper line drawn in the sand to show that violence against women is utterly unacceptable. As long as men like Anton Mulder think they can get away with killing their wives with nothing more than a slap on the wrist that message hasn’t got through.

So many of the trials I’ve covered have been of men accused of killing women. Colleen Mulder, Karen Guinee, Rachel O’Reilly, Siobhan Kearney, Jean Gilbert, Celine Cawley and Sara Neligan all died at the hands of those who were supposed to love them. But it’s not just loved ones that kill. The list of victims can be added to, Melissa Mahon, Manuela Riedo, Mamie Walsh, Rebecca French; a litany of women killed by men. There are countless other women who can’t be named. Women who lived but who were subjected to such brutality that their lives have been shattered.

I’ve written a post over on The Anti-Room blog on the subject of sentencing for sex crimes. It’s an important issue. We need to draw that line in the sand and say it’s not acceptable if it’s ever going to stop.

Abigail

I’m going to step away from my normal subject matter for once today. You’d have to have been living in a hole on the dark side of an utterly deserted island to have missed the fact that Ireland is, not to put too fine a point on it, financially up the creek.

It’s hard to avoid the news that the IMF have hit town and are not even going to lay a wreath on the grave of the Celtic Tiger. We’ve had the boom times and are now facing the bust.

I don’t write about the economy. The only stories I cover tend to be the ones that are sparked by the money running out. Even though both my books are about millionaires, when you’re writing about murder, even a farcical quasi attempt at one, money is never anything more than set dressing. Death is the same whether it takes place in leafy suburbia or in a squat. It’s egalitarian that way.

But it’s hard to ignore what’s going on in Ireland at the moment. Ireland’s party is over and the hangover has hit. We’re left with a shambles of a government and a lot of lessons still to be learnt. Ireland is the teenager with Europe, caught running up the phone bill and about to be denied car privileges for the foreseeable future. The recession we’re in the middle of has hit the world but it’s knocked us for six. Suddenly we discover that when the money was there the bills weren’t paid and the debt collectors are knocking on the door.

But what brought us to this point after so many years of prosperity? Why were the health and education systems left to fall into disrepair while the population bought holiday homes in far flung places and patio heaters bristled in every back yard? When I think about the situation this beautiful country has got itself into my heart bleeds. The situation we’ve found ourselves in has a feeling of inevitability and that’s not just because the party went on too long and we all succumbed to a national orgy of excess. The problems have been there for almost as long as the republic.

Right from the start the writing was perhaps on the wall. A health service funded by an illegal gambling operation for example. The Irish Hospital Sweepstakes were famous for a flutter across the world and Ireland ended up with an enviable network of hospitals across the country. Now those hospitals are closing or scaled down one by one. The Sweepstakes themselves ended up in a sad little scandal as it was discovered that even when the cause was a noble one corruption wasn’t far behind.

I remember listening to an episode of the old BBC radio comedy show I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again. The show starred John Cleese and The Goodies, Bill Oddie, Graham Garden and Tim Brooke Taylor. In an episode from the 60s which involved a skit about a trip to Ireland they made a crack about finding the Irish Government sitting in a woodland glade with brown paper bags full of money. Now before all my Irish readers jump on me for referencing an Irish joke by a British show I’ll point out that it’s the subject matter of the joke I’m interested in here. The brown paper envelopes in the 60s…so reminiscent of the one businessman Ben Dunne handed former Taoiseach Charles Haughey, eliciting the now immortal response “Thanks a million big fella” back in 1991.

Then there’s the offshore gas deposits that would provide enough money to give Ireland a very nice little nest egg indeed. But they were sold off to Shell by Minister Ray Burke (who’s since been jailed for corruption in other, unrelated, matters) in the late 1980s.

A casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that the government (who for most of the independence of the State have comprised of Fianna Fail, with or without a minor coalition partner) have plundered the country for every cent they could get while investing as little as possible of the country’s money into the services that make a functioning economy. The observer could very well have a mental image of a robbery interrupted. As the lights come on in a bare wood panelled room the black clad robbers are stuffing as much loot into their pockets as they can before the cops arrive. There’s a filing cabinet overflowing with rifled papers, some of which are smouldering in the empty grate. When the cops do arrive our robbers fall back on tried and tested denials. “It wasn’t me Gov, no one saw me do it. You can’t prove nothing.”

Of course I’m not the casual observer. I live here and work here. It’s hard to build a fantasy scenario when you’re afraid of how much the looming budget is going to dig into your pay packet. Something really fundamental’s going to have to change here if things are going to get better and stay better. Ireland is a wonderful country, and don’t let anyone tell you different. But it’s been run into the ground by a load of people who shouldn’t have been let near a business let alone a whole country. For a republic that was born out of so much idealism it’s heartbreaking to see it brought so low. Greed and ineptitude has won out and now all that’s left is to pick up the shattered pieces. Let’s hope something better rises out of the wreckage and Ireland can learn from past mistakes.

Abigail

Brendan O’Sullivan’s family started to sob as the jury filed back into the courtroom. O’Sullivan himself glanced over at his wife Claire whose eyes never left him as the verdict was read out, even as the tears started to stream down her face.

O’Sullivan, a 25-year-old father of two little girls, with an address at 10 O’Gorman St, Kilrush, Co. Clare had shot his neighbour Leslie Kenny four times in his own front garden. Kenny died at the scene. He had one shot to the right side, another to his right hip and, after O’Sullivan had reloaded the shotgun, shots to each knee.

O’Sullivan’s defence was that he had acted in panic to protect his wife and daughters after Kenny had threatened to slit their throats and burn the house down on a previous occasion. The gun, it was heard during his week long trial, had come from his cousin, taken in because she feared her estranged husband would use it to kill himself.

Kenny had a string of previous convictions, 82 of them for crimes like burglary and assault. He had been arrested on numerous occasions for the possession of dangerous weapons including knives, a hammer and a syringe. In the euphemistic terms often heard in court he was “known to gardai”. Witness after witness testified that he brought fear to the heart of the Kilrush community, threatening people refused to share their prescription drugs with him or who crossed him in any way. He was an “unpredictable” character, widely known and widely feared.

O’Sullivan’s sister in law had testified for the defence that Kenny and his girlfriend had climbed unbidden into the car in which she was sitting with her partner, outside the AIB in Kilrush. He had threatened to slit her nieces’ throats, she told the jury, and to pour petrol through the letterbox of the O’Sullivan house and light it while the family slept.

It’s a hard thing, here in Ireland, to speak ill of the dead. The instinct to gloss over old faults once life is extinguished is hardwired into the Irish psyche. But with this trial it had to be done. Kenny had to be painted as black as possible if O’Sullivan’s actions were to be seen with any compassion.

The prosecution case didn’t seek to mitigate the character of Leslie Kenny but argued that no matter how bad a man he may or may not have been, his death was not lawful and more than that, was premeditated and with murderous intent. They said that the shotgun Brendan O’Sullivan had got from his cousin was not being minded as a philanthropic act but was there for self defence. They said that O’Sullivan had lured Leslie Kenny into his front garden that June morning and had taken the opportunity to murder him.

They disputed the defence theory that the placing of the shots suggested that O’Sullivan had been unused to guns and had not expected the kick of the gun which took his shots to their mark. They said that the position of the wounds was consistent with O’Sullivan shooting as Kenny got up after the first shot and kept coming. Shots to stop an aggressor but not aimed to kill.

It took the jury less than three hours to come back with their verdict. Guilty of murder. There was a shocked silence in the courtroom as the verdict was read out then the sobbing intensified as O’Sullivan’s family and friends clustered around him to hug him before he was lead away to start a life sentence.

The decision was perhaps not such a surprise. While anyone could understand O’Sullivan’s fear for his young family, he had reloaded the gun, even if he had only shot Kenny in the knees with the second two shots. The legal crime of murder is defined in the negative. In Irish law an unlawful killing is not murder unless there is an intent to kill or cause serious harm. With that intent there is an assumption that the accused knew the logical and probable results of his or her actions.

Even so it wouldn’t be the first time an Irish jury had acquitted someone who defended their home with extreme lethal force. The case of Co. Mayo farmer Padraig Nally is the most obvious one that springs to mind. Back in 2005 he was convicted of the manslaughter of traveller John “Frog” Ward. Nally had been terrified of Ward and had sat waiting for him with a loaded gun.

When Ward came onto his farm he snapped. He beat Ward with a stick “like a badger” then shot him as he limped away. He was sentenced to six years in jail.

But in October 2006 Nally’s conviction was quashed with the appeal judges ruling that trial judge Mr Justice Paul Carney had been in the wrong when he had not allowed the jury to consider a defence of full self defence and had refused to allow them to reach a not guilty verdict.

The jury at the subsequent retrial did in fact find Nally not guilty and he is now a free man. Earlier this year the government introduced new legislation that would allow the public to use “justifiable force” against an intruder.

O’Sullivan’s case might not have fallen with a defence of the home scenario but it does share certain characteristics with the Nally case. Certainly, albeit having come into the trial late, I would have expected a manslaughter verdict rather than murder. Obviously the jury disagreed.

Just before lunch today there was an indication of the way they might have been thinking then they requested certain pieces of evidence to be brought into the jury room. They asked for a paper target found at O’Sullivan’s house and a mobile phone that had been found broken in a garda search during the investigation.

The problem was that neither the target nor the mobile phone were actually evidence in the case. They had been gathered up and tagged as part of the garda investigation but did not form part of the prosecution case. Once the jury were told they couldn’t have the items they were looking for and where sent to lunch the legal arguments began.

The defence wanted to know how on earth they had heard about the paper target, since it had not been in evidence. They feared that it showed the jury were speculating on events in a direction the prosecution case had not gone and so were not heading towards a verdict based on the evidence in the case. Just after lunch, before the jury were brought back to be formally sent to their deliberations, John Phelan SC, the defence senior counsel asked the the jury to be discharged.

Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy refused the submission and said that the jury should be trusted to do their job. He had earlier refused to recharge the jury on the options open to them, those of murder, manslaughter and acquittal as the defence felt that the jury would not understand from his initial charge that the option of acquittal was open to them.

It remains to be seen whether there will be an appeal and if there is whether it will be successful but it’s hard not to see certain similarities with the Padraig Nally case here.

Brendan O’Sullivan’s family looked utterly devastated at the news, no matter how hard the reloading of the gun might have been to explain to any jury. Outside the courts a short while after the verdict the family bumped into a small group of jurors, leaving after performing their civic duty. There were angry scenes as the two groups waited for traffic lights to change from green to red. Family members shouted at the jurors “He’s not guilty”. The jurors looked shaken and hurriedly backed away from the crossing. As the family moved away the jurors were in a huddle talking to one of the court gardai. Several of them were visibly upset.

They’ve come to their verdict and presumably did so in accordance with the vows they had charged. We have very strict rules in place to ensure that the jury’s verdict is inviolable and that’s as it should be. But when a jury reach a unanimous decision on a murder conviction in such a short time it’s for the rest of us to wonder how they reached that decision. It remains to be seen what an appeal brings but one thing an appeal will not do is question that decision. That’s the justice system we have.

Abigail

Almost two years ago Eamonn Lillis killed his wife. He hit her over the head with a brick and then ran upstairs to fake a robbery to explain her wounds, while his wife, former model Celine Cawley lay dying on the frozen decking outside the kitchen.

He would later say in court, the highest profile murder trial this year, that he had acted like this to protect his daughter. He didn’t know his wife was so gravely injured, he said, and after a marital row had turned to violence both their first thoughts were for their daughter. They wanted to explain the marks from the fight on both their faces and so jointly decided to concoct a fictitious burglar.

Whatever went on that frosty morning just before Christmas 2008 we will never know for certain. We only have the word of the man now serving a six year sentence for killing his wife, who clung to the story of the masked bandit for far longer than good sense would dictate.

Now Lillis’s parenting is hitting the headlines again. It’s the latest stage in a an action started back in June by Celine’s brother and sister, Chris and Susanna Cawley. Under Irish law Lillis is not allowed to profit from killing his wife so loses his right to inherit her share of any jointly owned property. The Cawley’s are trying to ensure that he loses the right of his own share in that property, with the whole lot reverting to the couple’s daughter when she turns 18 later this month.

My heart goes out to that girl. This should be an exciting time for her, a milestone. But instead she has to watch her relationship with her only surviving parent raked over by the media and the general public.

This week the Cawley case took another step forward and was met by Lillis’s rebuttal. Chris and Susanna Cawley want Lillis declared legally dead so that his half of any shared assets will go directly to his daughter. But Lillis is fighting back. In an affidavit sent from prison he said he had discussed with his daughter what would happen when he got out of prison and that he had no intention of selling the family home of Rowan Hill, on Windgap Road in Howth.

“However the intention of my wife and I in placing the property in joint names as a joint tenancy was that our daughter would succeed to the property on the death of both of her parents. This is what I believe should happen.”

He added that she had been visiting him in prison and he intended to continue providing for her. “I want to return to the family home as her parent not as a sort of tenant at will or a co-owner sharing a jointly owned property with her.”

Providing for his daughter would be difficult he noted, since his manslaughter conviction rendered him virtually unemployable. "Many of my friends and acquaintances have distanced themselves from me. My reputation has been destroyed. My livelihood has been destroyed."

Because of this, he explained, he would also need the rental income from another house the couple had jointly owned in Sutton. Which, when added to half the proceeds from the sale of Toytown Films, the production company set up by Celine, should provide a sufficient income to allow him to keep parenting in the manner to which he has become accustomed.

Lillis insisted that losing his assets would be a punishment too far and that he had suffered enough. “Prison is a very difficult and alien world for me. However the greatest punishment is the geographical distance between myself and my daughter and the diminution in our relationship.”

It’s hard not to read Lillis’s words fighting for his assets without wondering whether his concern is for his daughter or his lifestyle. There was no indication during the trial that he and his wife were anything other than devoted parents to their only child. But she would be able to provide for herself once she hits 18. She already has her mother’s half of everything. She also has a very loving family behind her who will stop at nothing to protect her interests. Losing your money, when it’s taken away from you, doesn’t make you a bad parent, but this seems to be what label-conscious Lillis feels.

Anyway, the case is still ongoing. There’s been a three week adjournment but it will be back in the headlines before long. This is one story that will never really go away, sadly for all concerned.

Abigail

If you’re Irish the last 24 hours will have had you cringing. Not one but two government ministers have made international headlines in ways that can only bring embarrassment to the country as a whole. One of them would have been bad enough but two in such quick succession does nothing to disprove any stereotypes that Ireland has been trying to escape for years.

If you haven’t been following the news or if you’re not Irish and are wondering what the hell I’m talking about it all started yesterday evening when the news broke that Minister for Science Conor Lenihan was to launch a self published book by a constituent which aims to debunk the theory of evolution.

The story had been buzzing around cyberspace for a couple of months but as the launch neared it gained critical mass and went well and truly viral. The subject was being discussed on two popular Irish forums, Politics.ie and Boards.ie then it found it’s way onto Twitter. As tends to happen, this sent the story into the stratosphere. Before long the story had been picked up by high profile tweeters like Ben Goldacre, the science writer and Guardian columnist.

[tweeted]http://twitter.com/bengoldacre/status/24424753852[/tweeted]

Dara O’Briain, the comedian and broadcaster also chimed in.

[tweeted]http://twitter.com/daraobriain/status/24415254156[/tweeted]

Then the story got picked up by the traditional media appearing on the evening news on both RTE and the BBC. Conor Lenihan appeared on RTE’s 9 o’clock news completely unrepentant. He said he didn’t see a problem with the launch as the author, John J. May, was a constituent and a friend. His name disappeared off the launch flyer on Mr May’s website. Then this morning the Irish Times announced that Lenihan had pulled out of the launch.

This is John J. May. This is the man who Conor Lenihan was willing to hold himself up to public ridicule for. Many, many years ago I worked for John May. He ran a company called The Day You Were Born. The name kind of gives it away. For a small fee you could get a piece of paper with information about the day you were born. You know the kind of thing – that day’s headlines, sports results, what was in the chart. You can still get that kind of thing now but back then, in the early 90s it was a reasonably new idea.

My job was to get the headlines. I spent some very happy weeks in the Reading Room of the National Library going through microfilms picking headlines for each day in a certain year. I still remember some of the news stories I found during that time. The broadcast of Orson Welles’ War of the World, as covered by the Irish Times, or the reading in the Abbey of one of Yeat’s plays when he had engaged with a heckler about the merits of his writing. I was there the day Charlie Haughey walked out of Leinster House for the last time. I had been listening to the radio knowing something was imminent and lead a mass walkout as we all left our books and ran downstairs to watch the doleful procession leave Leinster House, ignoring our pale faces pressed up against the wire that separates the Dail from the Library.

There were a group of us working for May. Every couple of weeks, it might have been once a month, we all met up in a pub in Clondalkin where he would brief us and hand out the pay cheques. We all thought him a little odd but we all needed the work so no one wanted to rock the boat. It was definitely one of the odder jobs I have had.

Years later I ran into May again. I was getting work experience in special interest station Anna Livia FM and May turned up as a funding guru with radio experience. Rumour had it he had run a pirate station in the 80s that had been based around where the Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre is now.

John May always seemed in those days to be a bit of a Flash Harry character. I’m not by any means suggesting that he did anything untoward, just that he was a man who always had an eye for a fast buck and was enthusiastic and diligent in getting it. I had heard something about affiliations with some kind of Christian group but don’t know any details about that.

The way he is pushing this book of his is no deviation from type. He’s a pushy, fast talking person and it doesn’t surprise me that he would manage to pull off a coup like this, guaranteeing his tome will get world wide publicity and will undoubtedly sell more than it would otherwise.

It doesn’t surprise me that he would end up in the middle of something like this but what does surprise me is why a government minister would get involved. It doesn’t really matter if Conor Lenihan goes along to tomorrow’s Gorillas and Girls launch party in Buswells Hotel. What does matter is the fact that he agreed to it in the first place.

He might think that he was going in a personal capacity but he is a government minister with special responsibility for science and the book is anti evolution. What exactly did he think was going to happen. Surely if John May is a friend of his he would know that May would make sure the launch got as much publicity as possible. It’s years since I’ve seen the man and even I could figure that one out. The problem the minister doesn’t seem to understand is that in cases like this there is no “personal capacity”. If in his personal life he is a rabid creationist, say, he should not be the man standing as a figurehead to promote and champion Irish science. If he can’t understand this surely at the very least his political acumen should be severely in doubt?

The Lenihan debacle was bad enough but this morning another embarrassing story broke, this time centring around the Taoiseach himself, Brian Cowen. This morning Brian Cowen appeared on Morning Ireland, the main breakfast news programme in the country. It was a pre arranged interview. The Fianna Fail party, his party, were having their yearly think in down in Galway before the Dail resumes sitting next month after the summer break.

You would have to have spent the last year or so on another planet not to have heard of the spectacular crash and burn that has been the Irish economy. Things have been bad for a while now and this December’s Budget is likely to be a particularly tough one. You always know things are bad when the media start over using the word “swingeing” when talking about funding.

Cowen’s appearance on radio to talk about the economy isn’t so very unusual in these trying times but this morning something about his voice on air and the way he bumbled through some of his answers provoked a fairly speedy response. Opposition politician, Fine Gael’s Simon Coveney got the ball rolling.

[tweeted]http://twitter.com/simoncoveney/status/24458595143[/tweeted]

When Cowen got off air he was approached by the waiting media in Galway. TV3’s Ursula Halligan asked him if he was in fact hung over after a late night, a fact he spiritedly denied. But by then it was too late. Once again the story had leapt from Twitter into the waiting arms of the International media. As I write this the story of the question and Cowen’s denial has made it onto the BBC news. It’s also been picked up by the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today and has been picked up websites in South Africa and India. It’ll probably keep growing.

Throughout the day those who were in the bar of the Ardilaun Hotel near Salthill in Galway last night, where the Fianna Fail party and attendant political correspondents are staying, came forward with stories of what went on last night. Stories of late night sessions abounded, but whether or not anyone breaks ranks to give a full blow by blow account remains to be seen. In the end only those who were there on the night will know exactly who was there and what went on but again, it’s not really important.

On Liveline this afternoon, members of the public were queuing up to give their support to the beleaguered leader. Everybody deserves time to unwind, they said. Give the guy a break. We all like to think our politicians are human, Ireland perhaps embraces such displays of human frailty more than most. Maybe this was why Bill Clinton decided to wait until he was on a visit to Dublin to apologise from his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. But there’s a big difference between Brian Cowen and Bill Clinton in this regard. Clinton was leading another country. He was a visitor and his admission put us in the glare of international media.

Brian Cowen is leading this country and he’s not accused of playing around with an intern. The suggestion is that he was unprofessional enough to stay up so late he was groggy and hoarse the next morning when he knew he had an interview on one of the most listened to shows in the country, his country. He’s the guy in charge. He doesn’t get to play with the rank and file. He has the ultimate responsiblity for steering this sinking ship and, at a time when decisions are being made about how much the country is going to suffer in the forthcoming Budget, surely coming on air sounding, at best tired and disinterested, at worst hung over, is not the way to instill confidence.

Once again if he can’t understand why appearances are important now, why having credibility as someone who’s holding the reigns is vital. If you were working in a company and had heard rumours of redundancies and pay cuts how would you feel if you came into work to a boss who was unshaven, sweating and looked like they were wearing last night’s clothes. I’ve no idea what Cowen was wearing on the radio this morning, he could have even been in his pyjamas, but he sounded as if he was wearing last night’s suit.

What both incidents in the past 24 hours have shown is that there are people in Fianna Fail, who are the majority partner in our coalition government, who do not understand that the job they are doing has a lot to do with appearances. You keep up appearances to keep people’s confidence – not just the voters but also the world outside. All these two stories have done is give a picture of a country that is floundering, one that is a joke. A country that has no leadership.

It’s that that makes me embarrassed to be Irish today. I hope it embarrasses those at the centre of the stories as much.

Abigail

The first photographers arrived outside Arbour Hill Prison in Dublin at some point in the middle of yesterday afternoon. Their numbers swelled as the afternoon and evening wore on as they were joined by their colleagues and crime reporters from the various media outlets. By this morning there were around 30 eagerly awaiting the release of the man who is currently Public Enemy Number 1, convicted rapist Larry Murphy.

Shortly before 10.30 the doors of the prison opened and Murphy walked out, ignoring the press and the few assembled members of the public, to get into a waiting taxi and drive away into something that doesn’t remotely resemble obscurity. Apparently he managed to lose the following press posse but he won’t avoid them for long. According to reports on Twitter one of the Irish tabloids has posted his photograph all over his native Baltinglass asking for anyone seeing him to call the paper with the details.

Murphy’s release has been a national obsession for days now. While the flames of media interest might have been somewhat fanned by the summer lull in newsworthy stories it’s a valid cause for concern. Even if the crowd waiting outside Arbour Hill prison might have called to mind Chris Morris’s notorious Brass Eye Paedophilia Special (which featured material about a child molester disguised as a house and an angry crowd outside a prison tearing another paedophile to bloody pieces – in the name of satire rather than news coverage I hasten to add) Murphy’s release is a frightening prospect.

Let’s take a moment to go over why he served 10 and a half years in jail (and I’ll get to the length of time he served in a bit). He abducted a woman he had never met, bundled her into the boot of his car, took her up to the Wicklow Mountains and raped her repeatedly. When he was surprised by two huntsmen, who miraculously arrived and saved the woman, he was trying to suffocate his victim with a plastic bag.

He was sentenced to 15 years in prison but because of the clause in Irish law that allows any prisoner the particularly juicy carrot of between a quarter and a third off their sentence if they keep their nose clean in jail, he’s out after 10 and a half. Murphy refused to take part in any kind of rehabilitation in jail but that wasn’t part of the deal. So he’s out and the press are on his tail.

From now on he’ll have to tell gardai where he is and what he’s doing, but since there’s nothing like America’s Megan’s Law here in Ireland the general public won’t share that information. Granted there’s a very good chance that if he so much as sneezes for the foreseeable future it’ll be on the front pages of the next days papers but that interest will wane as soon as the next story comes along. He’ll make the front pages if he strikes again but that isn’t going to make any of us sleep better in our beds.

Murphy isn’t a unique case. There are plenty of vicious rapists serving time in Irish prisons and some are even up for release soon. Back in June one of them, Michael Murray, who raped four women over six days in 1995, actually went to the High Court complaining that he couldn’t lead a normal life because of the constant hounding by the press. Murray had undergone counselling in prison but even his own counsel admitted he was an “abnormal menace” to the community. Murray was unsuccessful in his action but you only have to look at the criticism that gets thrown at the press with every high profile trial, or even, as I’ve found out, any book about a high profile trial, to see that it’s by no means a given that any future case would get the same ruling.

Yes the press get excited about people like Murphy and Murray getting out of prison. Yes sometimes the coverage can get a little over the top. But ultimately the press are only doing their jobs. Things that make people feel unsafe make good stories and sell newspapers and I’m sure over the next few weeks we’ll hear arguments for some of the more shameless red tops that a public service is being done.

The problem is that it’s really not their job to keep an eye on dangers to society. It’s something they’ll do but for very different reasons from the ones such a job should be undertaken for. I’m a great believer in an ethical press and think that a strong media is necessary to protect society from corruption and injustice but I’m also a realist. There will always be other reasons why something like this makes a good story. A lot of those reasons have very little to do with altruism or ethics. Do this job long enough and the cynicism comes naturally.

The people who should be keeping an eye on people like Murphy are not the press but the gardai. The problem with that is that with the best will in the world, the gardai are unlikely to be up to that particular job. They can’t shadow Murphy 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and they’re going to have to rely on him to cooperate with them to keep tabs on him any other way.

The real problem with this mess is that this point has been reached so soon. Ten and a half years is not a long time for such a brutal rape – but then rape sentences in this country are usually on the short side. I’ve written here at length in the past on the subject of rape sentences and once again I’ll say they are too short.

Generally speaking it’s only the very brutal rapes that make the headlines. While the media will be all over this case, where an Irishman has carried out a brutal attack on an Irish woman, they have been a lot less quick to cover equally nasty rapes involving an accused and a victim from outside Ireland. I’ve covered enough rape trials for news agencies to know how depressing it can be to write copy about horrific events day after day and send them out to every newsroom only to have your work ignored time and time again. Unfortunately familiarity breeds contempt. Newspapers want news and court cases tend to be too repetitive to give that newness. As a reading public we won’t read the same stories over and over again so why should the papers publish them?

There’s also the issue of sensitivity of course. The fact that rape trial reporting is a tricky business with the need to ensure anonymity of both accused and victim for the duration of the trial at least, doesn’t help matters. Consequently it tends to be only the most brutal, the most scary and predatory attackers that make the headlines. Only the most shocking cases. There are a great many more trials that go on without a murmur and whose sentences are not remarked upon.

When someone like Murphy gets out after ten years there’s an outcry, and there should be but this is a problem that is there all the time. Rape sentences are frequently under ten years. Life sentences are rarely given and when they are more often than not over turned on appeal. That needs to change. Someone who kidnapped a woman and threatened to kill them should have been sentenced to a lot more than 15 years. If someone’s a menace they should be taken off the streets until they are no longer a mess.

Instead we offer carrots to people who don’t deserve them, a light at the end of the tunnel for people who only deserve to see the light from an oncoming train. I’m thinking in particular of Gerald Barry, sentenced to two life sentences last December for the rape of a French student less than two months before he went on to brutally murder Swiss student Manuela Riedo. When he was handing out sentence Mr. Justice Paul Carney mentioned the quarter off saying that Barry was a perfect illustration of why it should be discretionary.

Surely it’s time we gave judges the power to set the upper limit of a sentence for serious crimes? The Court of Criminal Appeal would always be there but why can’t trial judges decide, like their English counterparts, that someone convicted of rape or murder should serve a minimum amount of time behind bars. You will never hear of someone being sent to prison for “at least 35 years” from an Irish court because the judges are not allowed to do that. They pass their sentences according to very strict rules. I can see why those rules are there but there has to be more flexibility to punish those guilty of the worst crimes this society has seen. There would still be the freedom to decide on a case by case basis. If someone is found guilty of an inconceivably horrific crime the courts should be able to ensure they never see freedom again.

If someone is going to remain a serious threat to society they should not be allowed back into it, even if that means holding them in continuing custody “just in case”. I’m well aware of the human rights side of this, and the fact that our prisons are already overcrowded and our courts are working more efficiently than ever, but beside all of this there has to be justice. There are certain crimes where the punishment should be life and there should be the freedom to ensure that life does mean life. As it is we will see the same circus as we have today the next time someone particularly nasty walks free while still in the prime of life. It’s not up to the press to shout about the unfairness of it all, it’s something that needs to be changed as a matter of policy, not a kneejerk reaction or vote catching sop. Until then there will be too many victims who feel that justice wasn’t served and too many women afraid of real bogeymen.

Category: Ireland (Page 5 of 13)

The Right to Believe in Nothing

A few thoughts on International Women’s Day

Same as it Ever Was?

I’m Not Leaving Either

A Line in the Sand

Welcome to the Asylum

A Question of Self Defence

Responsible Parenting?

A Matter of Credibility

A Menace to Society?

The Books

The Books

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