Tag: Journalism (Page 2 of 14)

Abigail

It’s been almost three years since I started this blog. I started it to help publicise my first book The Devil in the Red Dress, which was due to be come out that November. The idea was to write about the process of being published for the first time as well as to talk about the case that Devil centred on and others that I covered day to day in the courts.

Since then I’ve written two other books and covered many other cases. All the while I’ve written about what I was up to on here. For the past few months though I haven’t been posting much. It’s been a long time since I’ve written a daily post and even longer since I followed an unfolding story over successive posts as I used to with the trials I covered. I’ve felt increasingly tongue tied when I went to post and have recently been considering stopping the blog altogether.

But this isn’t goodbye – just a bit of a change in gears.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking this year. Back in May my agent retired and I was faced with the prospect of having to sell myself from scratch again. I may have a better CV these days but any new agent is going to have to believe in me and in my ability to have a long and hopefully lucrative career. But selling yourself when you’re having doubts about the product yourself isn’t the easiest thing in the world.

I fell into court reporting almost by accident but once I started I grew to love it. I loved the almost academic ritual of the courts and the drama of each individual trial. I’ve written many times here about the stories that can be found in the most brutal cases. The administration of justice fascinates me as a writer – it’s pure human conflict – the raw material of stories since the dawn of time. As long as I could sit quietly in the bench behind the barristers with my notebook and my pens cataloguing what went on before me I was never short of something to write and some of the stories that unfolded in those panelled courtrooms played out as dramatically as any fiction I could dream up at my desk.

I had thought that I had found my niche, somewhere I was happy to work for years to come but there’s the rub…for the past year or so it’s dawned on me that perhaps it wasn’t where I wanted to serve out the rest of my time. It’s an odd thing working as a reporter in an Irish court. I firmly believe that it’s vital that journalists cover the courts. Justice must be done in public and the press bring justice out of the courts and onto the breakfast table where it can be openly discussed by all. That’s not always the way it feels though. The press are viewed as irritants at best, at worst an infestation that in an ideal world would be eradicated just like rats or cockroaches. It’s an attitude you find amongst the legal professions, the gardai and the public. I’m not saying it’s held by everyone but it’s widespread enough to get a bit wearing on a daily basis. There’s a perception that the only reason the courts are covered is to titillate the baser instincts of the masses, a freak show that makes a circus out of the august institution of the Law…and having seen some of the scrums after particularly high profile trials I can see how that perception could have come about.

As a freelancer I’m limited in the kind of trial I can cover. I can’t afford to sit in court for weeks on end when it’s a story I can’t sell. Against the backdrop of the smoking embers of the Irish economy only the sensational trial will stand out with a suitably photogenic cast. Unfortunately for me but fortunately for Ireland these trials are extremely thin on the ground. It might sound cynical but that’s the name of the freelance game and it’s not one I have any chance of changing.

This year the one thing I keep coming back to is that I’m tired. I’m tired of justifying what I do. I’m tired of explaining the difference between a court reporter and a crime reporter (we cover the trials – they cover the crimes). I’m tired of arguing about my right to do my job and I’m tired of people taking exception to me describing things as I see them. I’m tired of the shocked looks when I describe my day in work – especially when it’s a day we’ve heard post mortem results. Most of all I’m tired of people thinking I’m a one-trick pony who only does one thing. I’ll have been working as a court reporter for six years come October and I’m ready for a change.

Now I know it’s not something I can just step away from. I’m the author of two books on memorable trials that still manage to make headlines. I’ve contributed to a couple of shows on true crime that still find their way into late night schedules. I still know what trials are coming up in the new law term and which ones will probably draw me back to court but there’s so much else. For the past three years I’ve written about murder trials here and in the Sunday Independent, on Facebook and on Twitter and jealously guarded the brand I was trying to build. But increasingly that’s not enough. I love the conversations I’ve had late at night on Twitter about 70s British sci-fi and horror films. I’m a total geek when it comes to fountain pens and old Russian cameras and I love French music. I’m currently obsessed with the idea of finding natural alternatives for the various potions I find myself slapping on my face far more earnestly than I did in my 20s and I’m resurrecting my ancient 1913 Singer sewing machine. I’m toying with the idea of starting a blog for fiction where I can post short stories and maybe start to outline another novel. It might mean confusing the Google bots who come to catalogue my daily ramblings but I want to give murder and prisons and social unrest a break for a while and talk about anything and everything else.

After all there’s so much more to life than death!

Abigail

I’m sure I’m not the only journalist glued to the whole cataclysmic mess that is the UK phone hacking scandal. It’s a proper toe-curling political and social scandal on the scale of Watergate and at its heart is the press itself…and whatever else we might or might not get up to we do love reading about ourselves.

The dust is very far from settling on that that story and it’ll be a while before everyone knows just how far the toxic fallout has settled but even at this stage one thing is certain. This is a story that will be talked about and written about not just for the coming months but for years to come. It’ll be picked over and analysed and agonised over while many breasts are beaten in hollow mea culpas and many other shoulders shrugged.

So I’m getting in relatively early. I’m not getting into the rights and the wrongs of phone hacking and whatever else is lying in wait to come out next. There’ll be plenty written in other places than here. This is simply a personal view.

Journalistic ethics are in the spotlight at the moment and the general consensus is finding them absent at best, if not festeringly rotten. In a survey commissioned by the Irish Medical Council earlier this year only 37% of Irish people trusted journalists to tell the truth. We came in above politicians but given this was before the last general election that really isn’t much of an achievement. But it’s not a recent slide. I know the guarded look that comes across peoples faces when I tell them what I do and I know the reaction of some of my actor parents’ friends when they learned my chosen profession. It’s not just that people are worried at ending up in the story it’s that they expect me to twist their words if they end up there. What’s really crazy is that a lot of them relax when they find out I write fiction as well – even though the odds are far greater of them ending up there, unless they kill someone.

I’m not wringing my hands and whining that no-one likes me because I’m a hack. I know that by writing true crime I’m skating on the edge of what’s considered respectable to write about. Once again I would probably get less flack if I wrote crime fiction – because then I’d only be dreaming up interesting ways to kill people instead of writing about peoples’ actual attempts. The fact that I cover the trial rather than doing the death knocks and chasing grieving families doesn’t count for much when I’ve written not one but two books picking over every bloody detail of stories that might have faded away as the public looked to the next big thing…or so some may think.

But that doesn’t make me unethical. It just means I’m doing my job. On the back page of it’s final edition the News of the World quoted George Orwell. The essay they quoted is called The Decline of the English Murder and in it Orwell examines the public fascination for a good murder. He talks, tongue in cheek, of the “golden age” when murders harked back to a sense of melodrama that chimed with the public consciousness. Modern murder happened too easily, he argued, to stick in the consciousness of a nation numbed by war. Orwell’s modern murder happened in the mid 1940s…but his point still stands. There’s still an appetite for death, one that is part of human nature, but as life has been cheapened with an increase in thoughtless deaths so that appetite is increasingly seen as a guilty thing, one of our baser instincts that has no place in a civilised society.

The ongoing revelations of the hacking of murder victims phones and the rest feed into a perception that’s been there for a long time. The dodgy journalist is a stock character anywhere from Harry Potter to Coronation Street. I suppose it goes hand in hand with the fact that part of a journalist’s job is asking questions that people don’t want asked and on occasion snooping where some would rather you didn’t go. But if journalists didn’t have this instinct how many injustices would have gone unremarked? How many scandals would have gone uncovered?

It all goes back to ethics and journalistic ethics are something that perhaps have been increasingly overlooked over the past couple of decades. When there’s an increasing pressure to sell newspapers in a market that’s changing so quickly and shrinking even faster then the urge to satisfy public curiosity with gory details and juicy revelations will grow and can in some cases leave taste and ethics languishing in its wake. When I studied journalism in the mid 1990s, in a four year course that covered everything from languages to philosophy to film theory, there was no dedicated strand of the course that covered ethics. We were made aware of the NUJ Code of Conduct but a dedicated class, where ethical issues could be debated and fully understood, was lacking. How can you trust that young journalists will have a sufficiently strong moral compass to negotiate frequently complex ethical issues if you don’t give them the training to recognise these issues when they arise?

The exclusive has become the be all and end all and “human interest” has become a driving force. Everyone who covers murder trials knows that even that formulaic process has it’s money shots. The tears of the victim’s mother, the stoney face of the accused when he’s sentenced. We write according to narrative rules that are embedded in instinct. In order to sell a trial you have to draw out the emotion and spoon feed it to a public numbed by constant repetition. We fit the characters in a trial into the same roles that they have occupied since the popular press came into existence, the dramatis personae of a melodrama with a fixed outcome and set pieces. It really is nothing new…even Jack the Ripper himself, it’s been suggested, had help from the press – the infamous letters with their bloody signature that gave a monster such a memorable name may even have been hoaxes written by newspaper men to drum up more readers.

I write about murder trials because that structure fascinates me. I’m interested in what drives someone to kill, on how easy it can be to take that decision to break one of the deepest taboos and end a human life. It’s an interest that hasn’t just been limited to the so-called gutter press. Charles Dickens covered many a murder and Truman Capote’s greatest work was not the tale of Holly Golightly but the examination of the brutal murder of a family that rocked a small town. But I know that in the eyes of some people out there I might as as well be rooting through people’s bins and papping celebrities.

I’ve always cared about ethics. It’s not enough to observe the law, there is a moral responsibility there as well. It’s important to be fair, not just because I’m afraid of influencing a jury, but because it matters. The press have always been known as the Fourth Estate and with that comes a duty. We are allowed in the courts to make sure that justice does not take place behind closed doors. It’s the press who keep an eye on the politicians to ensure that they have the public’s best interests at heart. That’s the way it should be and that’s still often the way it is. In the face of all these recent revelations those sentences might sound trite and insincere but if the fall-out of the hacking scandal results in a hamstrung press that cannot shine a light on bad men and corruption society as a whole will be all the poorer for it.

There will always be a grey area here, a blurred line between public interest and what the public is interested in but without strong ethics journalism, and investigative journalism in particular, will suffer. The subject will be done to death in the weeks and months to come but somehow that trust will have to be rebuilt. As long as the press is attacking itself and there’s ammunition for it to do so, other stories are being ignored. Even by making that distinction between the “gutter” and the “quality” press journalism isn’t being served. There are plenty of ethical journalists out there but it’s too easy to tar us all with the same brush. This is a massive subject and far too big for a single post. By the time the dust has finally settled in this almighty mess I just hope that journalism doesn’t take too big a hit. I don’t know how this is going to fixed but I hope someone out there does. I became a journalist because I wanted to make a difference not because I wanted to rake muck. There should still be a place for making a difference when the last shots have been fired.

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

Today I watched the sentencing of a truly evil man. I don’t use the word lightly. I’m the first person to say that the word “evil” is misused in the media these days. It seems like anyone convicted of a violent crime will lumped in with the devil by tabloid subeditors. We have had evil rapists, evil wife killers, evil paedophiles presented to us with such regularity that the word has almost lost all meaning.

Take the cases of Larry Murphy and Gerald Barry for example. Murphy abducted a woman from the street and took her up to the Dublin mountains where he subjected her to a horrific rape. Barry killed Swiss student Manuela Riedo and raped a French student. Both cases were horrific, the type of crime that triggers some primeval fear, the threat of the unmotivated attack, the random motiveless crimes. Both men could be termed animals, monsters even, but evil is something different.

The word “evil” means something else. A more metaphysical threat beyond the ordinary. The ultimate black and white into which no grey is allowed. It’s something almost unimaginable, almost archetypal. Something beyond sheer brutality and horror.

Today’s sentencing was a case like that. In the years I’ve covered the criminal courts I’ve seen a lot of monstrous crimes, seen people convicted of murder and rape who I would have no hesitation in dubbing a psychopath but I would stop short of calling any of them evil. Irredeemable maybe, banged to rights certainly but not evil. That’s something else.

Well today was something else. The man in the dock was old and frail, approaching his 74th birthday. He wasn’t much to look at sitting huddled over his blue folder shuffling through the notes he had taken through the trial. He looked no different, no worse than any of the other paedophiles I’ve seen over the years, wizened old men the lot of them, accused by now grown up victims of crimes committed in the long lost depths of a shattered childhood. But this was different.

When I first started working in the courts I covered another trial with him at the centre. The victims then were two grown up women who he had abused when they were little girls in the 1970s. I hadn’t covered many trials back then and was shocked by what I heard but as repellent as the details were in that case this new trial brings things to a whole different level.

The victims now were three of his own children, who had not even been born when his previous crimes had taken place. They had ranged in age from 3 to 11 when the abuse occured. The courts had begun their summer break when the jury found him guilty of 87 counts against three of his children after a two month trial.

Today the litany of crimes was recited once again. The court heard that his son, who had been abused between the ages of three and six had been so traumatised by the constant assaults that took place when he went to the toilet that he became unable to use the bathroom. When he was taken into foster care he had been so traumatised that he would defecate into a drawer of clean clothes rather than do to the toilet.

Two of the man’s daughters had told the court how their father had repeatedly raped them, describing a perverted twisting of adult love making that their mother had done nothing to stop. The abuse had started when they were as young as four. He would tell them he loved them as he lay on top of them, ignoring their tears and pleas to stop. He told one of them that this was just what fathers did.

Even when the HSE was notified and the children were taken into care, even when the man was charged with the offences so many years ago and the legal machinery had slowly started to move into action, the abuse did not stop.

One daughter described him banging on her window after she had been taken into care and persuading her to run away with him. When the girls ran away he raped them; in the disabled toilet in a McDonalds; on the ground in view of the boats in Howth; in another toilet in a shopping centre. One girl described how on the DART to Howth he had spread his jacket over their knees and abused her.

Both girls read victim impact statements to the court. Addressing her father one said that she had loved and trusted him, believed him when he told her he loved her best. It had all been lies, she said. She had blamed herself when she was taken into care, she had written, but it had been his fault.

She had lost her family, she said, had been separated from her brothers and sisters and now no longer knew them. When she was 16 she had found herself in a violent relationship but could not leave because she had nowhere to go, no one to turn to. The memory of what he had done to her was like “a shadow that won’t go away” she said. She still wakes up screaming.

She begged the judge to give her father a long sentence so she could feel safe again.

Her sister described how giving evidence during the trial had been “like being abused again”. She told the court that she hated the part of her that was related to her father and the part of her that had been abused. All that was left was a shell. “”I would have been better off if he had have killed me.”

Passing sentence Mr Justice Bermingham said it was hard to imagine a more serious offence. He said the rapes of the girls, after they had been taken into care, while their father had ignored the moves taken to stop the abuse, were at the worst end of the scale. The maximum sentence of life imprisonment was not one to be given lightly he told the court but these crimes warranted it. The man will start his life sentence when his current ten year term ends. With a degenerative heart condition and his advanced age there is a good chance that he will die in jail.

The two girls looked shell-shocked as the sentence was handed down but their father barely flinched. He shrugged at his legal team and did not look at his daughters agonised faces.

The man cannot be identified, since to do so would also identify his children who deserve to have a chance to try to rebuild their lives in peace now that their father is locked away from them. They have suffered horrendously at his hands and have been left feeling that no one, not those closest to them, nor the gardai nor well meaning social workers could save them. Hopefully one day they will have some measure of peace and will know that at least some kind of justice has been done.

Their father is the only example of pure unadulterated evil I have ever seen. A devious and manipulative man who tries to bend the law to suit himself and has never at any stage shown the least sign of remorse, the coldest, most ruthless type of pervert who would use his own children for his own sexual gratification. He’s not a sick man, a twisted, depraved one maybe, but even the psychiatric report furnished by his own defence team could not find any mitigating mental dysfunction.

A fiend like that defies understanding. There was no unhappy childhood, no history of childhood abuse so commonly heard in defence submissions in cases like this. This man was and is an ice cold manipulator, a genuine monster who has destroyed those he should have protected. He really is the face of evil.

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

I’ve spent a large proportion of my time over the past fortnight talking about the dead. This is nothing unusual, I’ve worked in the courts for over four years now and tend to be seen as the oracle on all that’s gory for family and friends. You would not believe the number of people who want to hear about what poisons cause heart failure or the finer details of any of a dozen high profile murders.

There’s a fascination in this country for the macabre. We’re fascinated by death, the more violent or tragic the better. That doesn’t make us a nation of ghouls though, just one with an interest in our fellow man. It’s normal to be interested in your neighbours – who doesn’t take the opportunity to look into a curtainless window as you walk down the street? In a country where the rituals of birth and death still hold such a social resonance we all know that it’s at those moments you see people at their most unguarded – there’s a light on as well as the curtains being open.

For the past fortnight though I haven’t been talking about death in general, it’s been one death in particular. Not the death of someone I ever met in the flesh, or one that left a hole in my own life but one that I know the tiniest details of nonetheless.

That’s what happens when you cover a murder trial, you get the details – all the details. That’s why people have always and will always be fascinated in them. You watch a trial like that and you will find out details that you might not know about your spouse. The post mortem will tell you each mole and childhood scar, you might not know what that person was like to go for a pint with, say, but you will have more idea of a personality that you could have had in several casual meetings.

It’s a clinical kind of knowledge though, removed, academic. You will even go away knowing that most private moment that comes to us all, the moment, the ultimate instance of death, the last breath. A moment that loved ones might have missed will be examined in minute detail in front of strangers. That’s the reality of the trial process and that’s part of the attraction of this kind of trial.

Of course not all trials attract the same kind of scrutiny and people like me don’t end up writing books about them. I spent several years working for Ireland International News Agency. It was my job, and is still the job for those who still work there, to provide agency copy for the print and broadcast media on every murder and manslaughter trial before the courts. Starting off you don’t cover the big trials.

For every trial that sets editor’s pulses racing there will be a dozen that don’t. Those are the trials that the media don’t bother about, that appear as a side bar on page 11 or 12 of a paper. The acts of random violence, the young men from disadvantaged backgrounds who settle a disagreement a knife. The drunken rows, the senseless attacks, the depressing monotony of lives that were blighted before they were properly begun. These aren’t the trials you gossip about at the water cooler, these are the depressing meat of the criminal justice system, the ones that pass unnoticed.

The public don’t bother going to those trials, the papers don’t bother to cover them. Life after life is lost in obscurity, amounting to nothing but a violent sordid death. If the agency reporter doesn’t sit quietly for every day of the trial, filing copy that no one will use unless it’s a really quiet news day, no one will hear the details of that life and death except those directly involved and the lawyers.

No one cares about those trials happening in public. They are a depressing reminder of how cheap life can be and a side of humanity no one wants to hold a mirror before. But with the big trials it’s different. There’s something about the story that’s being told that raises it above the ordinary, a whiff of celebrity, a kink of weirdness, a view into a life in some way surprising.

The media cover these trials because the public want to know about them. It’s these stories I get asked about by friends, family and neighbours. The one’s that in some way rise up out of the norm and become the stuff of thrillers instead of a grim reminder of the briefness of existence. The protagonists are often rich, or if not rich at least possessed of some quality that separates them from the hot headed boys who get tanked up and stab their mates. It’s that factor that provides a distance so we can look at the sordid details as a story, a plot, rather than another human being meeting death before their time.

In recent years the refrain has been that these unusual trials are cropping up too frequently, that the public interest is being pumped by the hungry media and they are being led astray. I know a lot of people would think that I am also guilty of fanning that particular forest fire with this book, throwing my cap in the ring and exploiting the grief of the bereaved.

Anyone who thinks that is of course entitled to their opinion but it’s one I will take exception to if it’s put to me. I don’t consider what I do to be voyeuristic and I don’t consider my colleagues to be doing anything other than satisfying a public demand, which is the way newspapers have always worked and always will. When I write about a trial I’m not doing it to be ghoulish I’m doing it because it’s what I do.

I’ve always felt that it’s important that trials are written about, that in some way I’m helping with the whole constitutional imperative that justice be done in public, disseminating what goes on in the courtroom, bringing an informed reading to proceedings couched in arcane methodology and convoluted terminology and giving a voice in a way to those that can’t speak for themselves. I think that the media have a place within the courts and one that should be recognised and respected without accusing us of voyeurism and bad taste.

When I write about a trial I will try to show respect for everyone involved. For the dead who cannot speak and also those on trial, for the families of both and the witnesses who have to relive the traumatic past. Everyone I work with does the same. We might have a feel for a story that sells but that’s part of the business and part of our jobs and it’s not incompatible with respect and compassion.

Of course sometimes, when push comes to shove that balance gets skewed. There are times when the media scrum seethes forward and shoves us all into an unflattering spotlight. There are times when the excitement about a story gets out of control and enthusiasm for the job can seem like callousness and poor taste. It’s hard to explain news sense to someone who’s never had to find a story but it’s ingrained in most journos and can sometimes make us lose the head a bit but does not make us bad human beings.

Even in the heel of the hunt we don’t forget that we are dealing with death, that there are grieving family members and traumatised witnesses. It’s just that our job is not to wrap them in cotton wool – it’s to tell the story as it unfolds. All I can do when I talk about the deaths I’ve seen dissected is to talk about them with compassion, it’s got nothing to do with taste.

Abigail

I’m still whizzing round on the publicity merry-go-round for the new book this week. Today started off with back to back interviews and a reminder that even when you’ve a few interviews under your belt at a time like this you can still get that curve ball thrown at you when you least expect it.

My second interview of the morning was with Declan Meade on the Morning Show on East Coast FM. I’d been in to talk to Declan when Devil came out so it was nice to be back. at the end of the interview he asked me a question that had honestly never occurred to me before (an achievement since I’ve been eating, breathing and sleeping this book since the trial in January). Why, he asked me, had I referred in the book to Celine Cawley as “Celine” while referring to Eamonn Lillis as “Lillis”.

When you write a true crime book there are a lot of things to take into consideration. Quite apart from the fact you have to make sure you get the legal end of things absolutely right and double, and triple check all the factual details there are other, more subtle considerations. The language you use must be evocative but you’re not writing a work of fiction, it’s a record of an event, a tragic event that has traumatised all those touched by it and that has to be taken into account.

One of the most basic things that you have to decide on are what to refer to the principal characters as. In a court report of an ongoing trial there are conventions that you tend to stick to. Witnesses, the deceased and the accused are all referred to by their surname with the appropriate title before hand. Sometimes, to avoid confusion, say if numerous members of the same family are giving evidence you might resort to first names for clarity but for the most part its the formal title followed by surname.

When you’re writing a book or even a more fluid kind of article this form of address doesn’t always work. It can sound clunky and artificial. So you’re left with a choice. Do you use first names or surnames. Forenames can sound overly familiar but can feel like a natural choice when you’re talking about the victim, someone to be viewed with sympathy and compassion whose place in the story is to have a tragic ending.

For the convicted however it’s the flip side. Once they’re marked a killer by the decision of a jury they often lose their title, to be referred to ever after by their surname only. Referring to them by their first name just wouldn’t sound right, so they become the surname with an extra dose of ignominy.

It’s not a hard and fast rule of course. It can depend on the house style of the publisher or publication you’re writing for, sometimes everyone gets the surname approach although it’s generally not the other way around.

When I was asked the question I wondered briefly was I actually calling Celine Cawley by her first name because she was a woman. I know that when I was writing Devil and when I’ve written about both cases on this blog it’s been first names all the way. I don’t think it’s as simple as that though. I frequently refer to people who’ve played principal parts in the trials I’ve covered by their first names, mainly because I write in a more informal style here and it just sounds better.

There might be an element as well of the fact that when I’m writing about a case in depth it’s very hard not to develop a distance from the subject as you chisel the words into shape. I know when I’ve written true crime I think about the people and situations I’m describing in much the same way I would think about characters and plots when I write fiction. I’m aware that I’m talking about real events but to shape them into book form I need to treat them in the same way I would the raw material for any other kind of book.

It was a question that really got me thinking – always great when that happens. I’d love to hear what you think on the subject, weigh in with your own thoughts please – I’m perhaps too close to the subject by now and can’t see the wood from the trees.

Abigail

Death on the Hill hit the shops this week. To coincide with this I’ve been hitting the publicity trail. The last week has passed in a blur of corridors and studios and next week promises to be no different. It’s a necessary part of bringing out a book but it’s one of the more surreal parts of the job.

As a journalist I’ve been in a fair few studios over the years. I started out working in radio and it’s great to get the chance to be sitting in front of a mic again albeit on the other side of the desk. It’s strange to be answering questions rather than asking them and being an item on the running order, a part of the story.

It’s very different from the daily business of court reporting. Taking notes, checking facts, always on watch to catch the smallest detail that will make the picture that you paint at the end of the day all the more vivid. It’s quite a passive line of work, an observer not a contributor. Definitely not a position that tends to land in the spotlight.

Of course when you write a book it’s a different matter entirely. You’re no longer simply a story in the paper, waiting for tomorrow’s chips. You’ve pinned your colours to the mast and embarked on a project that involves, of necessity, some hard sell. Suddenly you’re flashing a smile and plugging away and getting ever more removed from the violent facts that you’re recounting.

Covering murder is an odd business. When you do the job for any length of time you develop armour so that the gory details slide off you like drops off an umbrella. You become flippant when faced with brutality, treating each tragedy lightly because it’ll only be followed by another. That’s not that you don’t have compassion, just that it get’s rationed, metered in the face of relentless details that bleed into one another as trial follows trial follows trial.

The details of each successive trial settle on each other until your brain is clogged by the fallen details of dozens of deaths, dozens of post mortems. You learn to leave the job at the end of the day and put aside the details and the pain of the victims and their families but your sense of humour gets a blackened edge and gallows laugh.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my job – well love is probably the wrong term, but it’s what I do and the work suits me. But when you’re selling a book it tends to come home that while you are happy to have a book with your name on it you’re also constantly retelling somebody else’s personal tragedy with each bright and breezy interview. It’s more than a little surreal.

All you can do is try to keep the balance. A balance between the book I’ve written, telling a story as a writer and a journalist, and the dark, tragic truth at the centre of it. It’s the nature of this kind of book. Most of the time I don’t navel gaze but when I find myself sitting in another corridor waiting to go on air to do another interview it can get a little introspective. Tomorrow starts with two such corridors. You have been warned.

Abigail

Mr Justice Paul Carney hit the headlines again this week. The most senior criminal court judge in the country, he’s never been one to mince his words. The comments that have excited comment this time were part of an address to a criminal law conference in University College Cork, where he is adjunct professor of Law.

He was presenting a paper on “Victims of Crime and the Trial Process” and made the point that as a judge he would rather not be able to identify the victim’s family during a trial. In the new courts complex on Parkgate Street the family of the victim sit in the rows of benches directly in front of the judge and equidistant from the accused and the jury. Mr Justice Carney said that ideally the family should not be within the line of sight of judge or jury although they should be moved into places of prominence after a conviction.

These comments have provoked an angry reaction from victims families. They understandably feel that they should be allowed to stare down the person who killed their loved one in court, and make them see the lives they have damaged by their actions. It’s always going to be difficult to balance the right of the victims’ families to show their grief and anger at what has happened with the necessary presumption in law that the accused are innocent until a jury decides otherwise.

I’ve heard arguments many times from those who have lost someone in violent circumstances that killers do not deserve that kind of dignity but the problem is that until they are convicted they are presumed innocent of all charges. That is the law we have in this country and it is a fair one. Everyone has the right to be judged by their peers and it is up to the Director of Public Prosecutions to prove the case against them. I know that if I was on trial for a criminal offence I would much prefer to be tried under our presumption of innocence than have to prove my case when the default judgement was guilty.

With the presumption of guilt an innocent man could be unable to prove his innocence without witnesses or forensic evidence. I can’t help but feel that it’s better the innocent have a chance to defend themselves than the occasional guilty man (or woman, of course) walk free. If I was wrongly accused of a crime I’d rather the deck was stacked a little in my favour.

When you cover a lot of trials you get used to making your own judgement about the guilt or innocence of the accused. We hear all the legal argument and frequently the gossip that passes around the court that juries are quite rightly shielded from. You can usually call the outcome of a trial and contrary to some opinions I think that generally the outcome is the right one. You could be forgiven for thinking that there is a never ending stream of those who have eluded justice but that simply isn’t what I’ve seen. There have been occasions when a verdict has surprised me, or that I’ve disagreed with one, but out of all the trials I’ve covered I can probably count those verdicts on the fingers of one hand.

I may have commented here about the bizarre animal that is the jury, the tendency of perfectly sane, rational people to seem to be overcome with a kind of madness as soon as they set foot in the jury room but I can’t think of any better way of doing it. Jury trials and the presumption of innocence together with thorough garda investigations and competent prosecutions and defence are the fairest way to do things. If it was up to the gardai to try those accused of crimes or the legal profession alone or even us press, justice would be poorly served. Too much familiarity breeds an unhealthy cynicism and those twelve men and women need to come to the task with fresh eyes and as few pre conceptions as possible.

It might seem heartless when a trial judge like Mr Justice Carney says he doesn’t want to know about the grief of those who are the living victims in a murder trial. He has to be neutral and he has to be careful that he does not sway the jury. It’s a difficult job but that reserve, that separation, is necessary for the jury to do their job properly. They aren’t jaundiced by exposure to too much violence and tragedy. At the end of each trial they are urged to judge the case as if it was someone they loved in the dock, to give the accused the same chance they would wish for themselves or one of their own.

It is one of the great difficulties of the legal system that the victims’ place in this is, of necessity, therefore reduced. It would be inhumane to ban them from the courtroom entirely but their very classification as the “victim’s” family presupposes that there was a victim, and leans towards the presumption of a crime for that victim to fall foul of. That simply doesn’t sit with the presumption of innocence. When we are writing about a trial we have to bear in mind that the victim for the moment is probably best termed “the deceased” and the language kept as neutral as possible while still telling a gripping story.

For those who have lost someone to a violent death this must feel intolerable. For them it isn’t simply an academic exercise of checks and balances to tip the scales one way or another. They’ve been with this from the start. They had to have the news of the death broken to them, the indentifying of the body, the horror of the post mortem results and the garda investigation that made funeral arrangements so much more stressful. They’ve had the glare of the media spotlight pointed at them, searching for signs of anguish as the journalists follow the story of the latest brutal death.

For the media it’s just another story, for the barristers, gardai and judges it’s just another case out of however many, but for the families it’s their lives. It’s not something they will ever forget, not something they will ever leave behind, something that will scar their hearts for ever more. When the gardai come to them with a suspect and they follow the tortuously slow progress to the courts it is personal and raw.

But it’s this very anguish that can get in the way of justice. Grief can be blind to the nuances of law, the clinical deliberations that should be granted to anything that will take away a person’s liberty. It doesn’t matter what they’ve done, the only thing you can do is trust that justice works and the system will creep forward to the right conclusion. As long as we live in a civilised society those checks and balances need to be there. If the shoe was on the other foot you’d be thankful of them.

But the problem is that sometimes the presumed innocent person in the dock isn’t innocent and those giving evidence have seen their guilt with their own eyes. In those cases it doesn’t matter how visible the grief or anguish, if they’ve sworn to tell the truth you have to assume that’s what they’re doing. The jury will judge what weight to give their evidence but there will be cases when people are telling the truth and have seen terrible things which they have to relive in the court. In his speech Mr Justice Carney also commented on another peculiarity of the layout in the new courts, the fact that witnesses must pass within arms reach of the open dock where the accused is sitting. It was a similar layout in the Four Courts but a situation that really should have been rectified when they built the new courts. There seem to have been rather a lot of practicalities of the workings of a criminal trial that weren’t considered when the new court complex was designed.

It’s not the first time Mr Justice Carney has hit the headlines from comments he’s made to the UCC Law faculty. In 2007 he caused uproar when he criticised Majella Holohan, mother of Robert Holohan, who used her victim impact statement to raise matters that didn’t come out as part of the trial. He’s an outspoken judge and will be in the news again I’m sure. His comments are always thought provoking at the very least and the coverage they provoke allow for wider discussion about important points concerning the criminal justice system. People need to understand the law of the land and discussion is part of that.

Abigail

I watch the search terms people use to arrive at this blog with interest. Every blogger gets some weird ones but I get more than most. It kind of goes with the territory when you spend most of your time writing about murder, rape, abuse, death and the media.

I write on a fairly niche subject so I end up high in the results for searches for Irish legal or criminal matters. There’s a couple of weird ones – I get a LOT of hits from Japan for naked caricatures since I posted on the paintings of our esteemed Taoiseach in the nip that appeared in a couple of galleries in Dublin a while back using a full frontal image from Galway cartoonist Allan Cavanagh. And recently I seem to have become a go to place for those looking for the recipe for ricin (though since I’ve written extensively on that very subject I brought that one on myself).

Today I got an unusual one, a sentence that took me aback when I read it in the list of Google searches. Someone had found my blog looking for the phrase “Abigail Rieley is scum”. I know that people sometimes have very strong views about what I write here and that’s why I have comments enabled on every post. Blogging is a social form of writing and I believe people should have the freedom to express their views. I won’t allow comments that will cause unnecessary offence or break the law but if someone has a rational case to make they can make it freely.

But it got me thinking. I write, for the most part, about death. I earn my living following the stories of some of the most violent deaths we have in this country and I comment on them. I’m aware that I can’t please everyone if I come down on one side or another in a trial but I will always try to be as fair as I possibly can. But however fair I am there is always the risk of upsetting someone.

That’s the problem with this line of work. As a court reporter specialising in criminal trials I am feeding one of the oldest appetites for news. It’s the same public hunger that demands public executions and fights to the death for sport. It’s the side of humanity that watches the pain of others with a bright glint in the eye. Before you recoil in disgust stop a minute – it’s a lot more common than you think.

It’s the same side of us that laps up crime fiction and violent movies. Just because it’s make believe doesn’t mean it’s a different urge. It’s the same sneering little voice that laughs at the audition stages of Britain’s Got Talent, willing dreams to be dashed and hopes crushed and will continue to watch even though psychologist have warned of the dangers to the more vulnerable auditionees. But what I write about doesn’t have the sanitised gloss of entertainment. It’s real life, real death. The raw explosion of emotion that leads one ordinary person to take another’s life. You realise very quickly when you work down in the courts that the average person on trial for murder is not a psychopath or evil or depraved. They’re just like you and me.

With every trial there are people who have lost, families who must listen to their loved ones reduced to an echo, a cipher who was at the centre of a storm and is now in front of the court as a a series of figments; forensic samples, perhaps a few photographs taken after death and the inevitable post mortem. It’s shocking in it’s mundanity.

I’ve seen the looks the family of both the accused and the deceased give us journalists as we file in to the front of the court. We’re usually seen as vultures, vermin scrabbling for the juicy titbits left over from a tragedy. I know how it looks, we all do. But the reality of the situation is that we are there to do a job and to feed an appetite for this kind of news. It’s easier to cover a trial when you aren’t emotionally involved and that distance tends to show itself as an increased cynicism and an outward callousness. We’re there to tell a story and allow the audience that same remove. We’re feeding an interest, crime and politics have been filling newspapers since they were just a bill pasted on a wall…at least we don’t write ballads about the more infamous trials these days.

I would argue though that court reporting’s not all base emotions. We’re witness to the carrying out of justice, one of the basic pillars of society. Without the courts we’d have anarchy, or something similar. When we write about murders we’re giving a voice to the dead and seeing their killers brought to justice – most of the time. Maybe the reason why there’s such an interest in crime stories is just that, because it puts the bad guys in their place and makes the world less scary. There will always be those that just see the sleaze and think what I do is sordid and perhaps even exploitative but all I can do is try to show them otherwise.

Tag: Journalism (Page 2 of 14)

Taking Stock

Another Fine Mess

Same as it Ever Was?

The Face of Evil

A Matter of Credibility

A Question of Taste

A Matter of Convention

In the Spotlight

Presumption of Innocence – a vital rule but a contentious one.

The Baser Appetites

The Books

The Books

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