Crime, ink

“Ah, come on, what’s Star backwards?”

2009-11-11T14:17:00.012Z

HE CERTAINLY wasn’t taking any prisoners.
I wasn’t sure what the reaction of Pat Kenny’s tormentor Alan O’Brien would be when Gary Ashe and I went to his home address to have a little chat with him. It was barely 14 hours after Monday night’s bizarre incident on RTE1 and maybe his blood was still up. Moreover, the questions I wanted to ask him weren’t conducive the conversation ending well.
O’Brien had been feted as something of a hero after he confronted Pat Kenny about his salary live on air during Monday night’s edition of The Frontline. I was watching the show myself and, as soon as he started his rant, I knew I would probably have to go after him the next day.
Presumably like most other news desks in the city, mine wanted firstly to find out the identity of heckler - and then what his story was. As I was driving in to work the following morning, I was frantically wracking my brains, wondering how I would find him.
In the end, I was saved by Today FM. Ray D’Arcy carried a live interview with the heckler, in which he revealed his names was Alan O’Brien and was from Inchicore.
That was all we needed. Within a few minutes we had his address. From there it wasn't too hard to establish he had been in trouble with the law on a few occasions.

(This photo by Gary Ashe shows Alan O'Brien giving me a piece of his mind. He got a good bit closer to me than he did to Pat Kenny. ⓒ Irish Daily Star)

He wasn’t exactly a master crime boss, but he had been before the courts. He was convicted of assaulting a man in a psychiatric clinic of St. James’ Hospital in Dublin (as well as damaging 12 plates, 12 bowls, 12 saucers and 12 glasses); he was fined €100 for criminal damage to a house in Drimnagh; he was given the benefit of the probation act for trespassing in a house in Ballyfermot. But the real item of interest was an incident on Grafton Street in December 2006. There, he launched abuse at people walking by, shouting: “Black Bastards...Muslim...Islamic scum.” He was later given a three month suspended jail term after he was convicted of one count under the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act.
Bingo. We had him. He was a racist thug. Now all we had to do was confront him and put the convictions to him. Maybe he would explode and shout how he hated foreigners coming into Ireland; maybe he would lose the head when his dark past was put to him.
The reality was somewhat different. In fact, after we got him, Gary and I walked away laughing, and with our tails slightly between our legs. He was clearly no racist - and clearly knew how to put us in our place.
We got him as he walked into his flats complex after a visit to the dentist. When we approached him, he was carrying a bundle of newspapers under his arm. After I told him who we were and where we were from, he sniffily replied: “I don’t do tabloids.” A quick glance at the papers under his arm bore that out - they were all broadsheets. Anyway, he deigned to talk to us about his intervention on the Frontline for a few minutes. Gary and I had already decided that we would get as much as we could out of him before we asked him about his criminal past.
So, to be honest, he talked on for four or five minutes about his rationale, while I pretended to listen. The reality is that while he was talking, I was vacantly nodding my head, all the time thinking: “Will I ask him now? Is he going to belt me when I put it to him?”
Eventually, he opened the door by saying how he had been in trouble with the law - but only for breach of the peace, don’t you know. “Well, let’s talk about the Grafton Street incident,” I said.
I braced myself for his reaction - but when it came it was completely unexpected.
There was no anger, no explosion, no self pity.
All I got was a look of contempt, mixed with pity.
“I do not have a racist bone in my body,” he said.
“But hold on a minute,” I countered. “You can’t really go round calling people black bastards…”
“Yes, I can. “I have Islamic friends, I am not racist.
“I was using very obvious insensitive things to see their reaction.
“And the reactions from some people were over the top.
“I was trying to get a reaction.
“Black bastards, Jews, Muslims, Greeks, it’s all just words.
“My brother in law is a black bastard - and I am a white bastard.”
Then he turned on me.
“The Star is not in a position to take the moral ground on the language they use.
“You use very figurative language to describe criminals from a certain area but you wouldn’t use the same language about the bankers.”
I protested, weakly, that we were going after the bankers big time - but he was in full flow now.
“If you want to put down these things as a way of taking the sting out of what I said to Pat Kenny, you go ahead and say what you want.
“My principles stand for themselves.
“You don’t even know the basis of what went on.”
Oh, eh right. Our carefully planned ambush collapsed as he laughed and asked us:
“Come on, what is Star backwards?”
Rats.
That’s what I was thinking as I slunk back to my car.

“I know this is a stupid question, but I’m paid to ask them: how do you feel?”

2009-09-21T22:39:00.009+01:00

His face betrays a gamut of emotions: terror, disbelief, despair, denial.
While I shake his hand, he stares off into the distance, as if he is can’t quite comprehend what is happening to him.
He looks as if he hasn’t slept since he walked free from a Garda station, 17 hours earlier: but who could blame him? How could anyone doze off after being grilled by gardai for almost a full day over the violent death of their sister?
As Anthony Ahearne walks towards us, it’s clear to see his world has been turned upside down.

I had seen this photograph of the 31-year-old the previous day, taken a few months, a lifetime, ago.
In the photograph with him is his sister Brenda, whose death he was questioned about all day Wednesday last week. They are celebrating her 30th birthday and both are clearly happy. It was taken in March, just six months ago. Brenda's sister Lisa is on the right.
But now in the flesh, Anthony looks completely different. The confident, relaxed, smile has dissipated. He seems to have shrunk, to have somehow gotten younger. As he approaches me and photographer Karen Morgan, I mistake him for a teenager.

(This photo, taken by Karen Morgan, shows how much he has changed from the birthday snap. ©Irish Daily Star)
The previous night he had been arrested after Brenda died following an incident at her twin sister Lisa’s home in the city. She suffered a single wound to the head, inflicted by the shaft of a poker. The poker embedded itself into her skull.
When we first heard about the death, it seemed an open and shut case: woman dies of head injuries, her brother in custody. We expected a court appearance in a matter of hours.
But within a few minutes of getting to the Richardson’s Meadows estate in Waterford where Brenda died, it was clear there was more to this story than met the eye.
A neighbour who spoke to Lisa’s partner John Kenny as the paramedics fought to save Brenda said he told her it was an accident, that Anthony was waving the poker about during a row and that the shaft broke off and slammed into her head.
A few hours later, John Kenny turns up and I speak to him. He fights back tears as he insists it was nothing more than an accident.
“It just flew through the air like a spear,” he maintains.
I check with a Garda contact. Could that really have happened? It’s possible, he says, warily. But the contact did confirm the poker was embedded in her head and, crucially, that there were no other injuries: whatever happened, Brenda had not been the subject of a sustained attack.
The next day, we write that the family insist it was an accident – other media outlets say she had been bludgeoned to death.
That’s the benefit of going to a scene rather than trying to cover a death from your office: you’ll always get something extra – whether it be an interview with a loved one or a snippet of information that changes everything.
Early the next day, I heard the news that Anthony had been released without charge: I knew that meant gardai were at least looking at the possibility Brenda’s death was an accident. If they felt they could prove she was assaulted, he would have been in court in a few hours.
I also know that, now he is out, there is a chance he’ll speak to us. Again, I head down to Waterford, negotiating with the Ahearnes all the way down from Dublin.
Eventually, after pleading, cajoling, begging and harassing the family for the whole day, Anthony agrees to meet us at 5pm.
We met in a car park in Waterford City, around 16 hours after he had been released from Garda custody.
He looks shattered, broken. A shell of a man.
There is no small talk. He stands glumly with his sister, Brenda’s twin Lisa, as well as her partner John Kenny and two of the dead woman’s three kids. They are standing by him. He looks grateful for the support.
I take the rest of them into the pub and offer to buy the kids a drink: they politely decline. Karen stands outside having a smoke with Anthony.
After a few minutes, he comes into the pub. He is ready to talk.
It was not an easy interview. He didn’t want to - refused to - talk about the actual events, but wanted to get across that whatever happened has been a mistake.
The conversation is stilted, awkward even: I try to draw him out, but his defences are understandably up.
And then I ask a silly question. As is my wont.
“I know this is a stupid question,” I say, “but I’m paid to ask them: how do you feel?”
What do I expect him to say? Great? Relieved not to be charged? Just wanna put it all behind me? You know yourself?
Of course I know how he feels – I can see it in his eyes. Put coarsely, he is fucked. But there’s no point me guessing that – I need him to tell me.
He looks at me as if I’m a muppet, as if it’s the most idiotic question that has ever been put to him.
But he starts talking.
“I will never be able to forgive myself,” he tells me.
He speaks of how he held Brenda in his arms as she slowly died; how he kissed her and told her to hang in there; how he begged her to stay alive; how he’ll never be able to forgive himself.
Stupid question number two from me: do you think you’ll ever get over this?
He stares at me. I can tell he’s thinking that really is the most stupid question ever. How could he ever do that? How could he ever put this behind him?
“I will never get over this. It will stay with me until I check out,” he says.
The interview is over a few moments later and we rush back to my car, a deadline looming.
As we work on our laptops, the Ahearnes walks past. Anthony is surrounded by his family.
But he has never been more alone.

“He ruined my life...he ruined our mother’s life.”

2009-07-19T23:05:00.005+01:00

She walks into the court, accompanied by the garda who had been with her 11 years earlier. Back then, she was a terrified 14-year-old, sitting in a room off the court, getting ready to give her evidence to the judge and jury via videolink.
It was a year after Simon McGinley raped her when she was just 13. It was a year after she had secretly, unwillingly, hit the headlines as the C case girl.
Now, she is a 25-year-old woman, still terrified, still damaged. But, somehow, she summoned up the strength to sit in the body of court number one and face her tormentor, the man who still comes at her and rapes her in her nightmares.
She sat right at the back of the court, occasionally looking over at Simon McGinley as Mr Justice George Birmingham told him he was jailing him for 21 years – although in reality with remission and having been in prison for a year already he’ll be free in 15.The only people she talked to was her garda, now a sergeant, and a family member of the victim of the latest woman raped by McGinley. An 85-year-old pensioner, for heaven’s sake.
The judge hit the nail on the head. “It is hard to come to terms with the fact that the same person is capable of raping a 13-year-old girl and then an 85-year-old woman.” Quite.
After the sentence is handed down, the judge rises for a few minutes. McGinley’s first victim quietly gets up from her seat and walks out. She’d seen what she wanted, needed, to see.
I rang her earlier in the day to tell her McGinley was up for sentencing for his latest rape. She rang me back a few minutes later to say she was coming down, that she had to see him being sentenced.
I met her at the Luas stop outside the Four Courts and walked her in to the complex, telling her to walk a few feet behind me just in case any photographers saw me with her and put two and two together.
By the time she got into court, the daughter of the now 86-year-old woman destroyed by McGinley had had her say. The victim impact statement was delivered with a dignity that was spellbinding. She essentially said McGinley had destroyed her mother’s life.
The C case woman never got a chance to tell a judge the damage McGinley had done to her. So here is part of an interview I did with her last month in which she does just that. Below that, I’ve put in the impact statement from the latest victim’s family.
This animal destroyed two women; a lady and a child.If you want to know what rape does to a victim and their family, read the two statements.
First, the child:

“He raped me the whole night.
“He kept stopping and raping me, stopping and raping me, stopping and raping me.
“He must have raped me about 10 times that night and then dropped me home and put a knife to my throat and said ` if you tell anybody I’m going to kill you and your family’.
“He just had no remorse in him, he had no feelings. It was like he didn’t care what he did.
“It’s like there is no fear, it’s like the devil is in him – the devil is in him.
“I am still, to this day, terrified if he comes near me.
“I hardly ever leave this apartment.
“The only time I leave this apartment is to bring the child to school, then straight back again. I get my money on Wednesday, do my shopping and straight back again.
“I don’t go out at the weekends. The last time I went out, me and my friend, some fella approached me and said `You’re the girl that was raped by Simon McGinley, aren’t you?’ That just turned me off going out, so I just don’t go out.
“I’ve set myself on fire, I’ve cut my arms, I’ve been and out of Portrane.
“It does not go away, the feelings don’t go away. The nightmares don’t go away.
“I can’t sleep. I have big massive bags under my eyes from not sleeping. I’m on sleeping tablets.
“About four hours sleep will have every night – sometimes even less.
“One time I was down in Woodie’s and I thought I saw a man like him. I was with my sister in a car and I just shouted `get out, get out, get out.’ I was afraid for my life.
“I’ve been in and out of hospitals.
They sent me to Warrenstown House, I stayed there for a year – that’s a children’s psychiatric hospital in Blanchardstown.
“I was in there for a year, highly medicated.
“I’ve been in and out of hospital a good few times.
“It’s hard but my little fella keeps me going. Only for him I would probably be 10 feet under the ground at this stage.
“I’ve tried to take my own life. I was in a coma, it was an overdose and my sister found me in the bedroom and that was only last year.
“I set myself on fire twice when I was in care and then I set myself on fire when I was on Portrane Hospital on the day of my 19th birthday.
“The fear. I just couldn’t hack it. Sometimes it just gets so unbearable that you just can’t cope with it anymore.
“You just can’t get him out of your head.
“He has ruined my life, he has ruined my life.
“You may say he has taken over my life, but I’m trying not to let him.
“I’m trying to get him out of my head, that’s why I’m going for counselling now.
“I feel like I’m choking because he was choking me and holding my mouth. I wake up all sweaty from having that dream.
“I remember trying to escape out of the van that night and he ran after me and grabbed me by the throat, shoved me back into the van and drove somewhere else and raped me again.”

Now, this is victim impact statement of the daughter of the lady he raped in her own home in June last year:

“My mother was a courageous, resourceful woman who raised 10 children in difficult times.
“It wasn’t until she was in her sixties that she had the leisure and the modest financial means to begin to really enjoy her life.
“She loved to travel and made regular trips to visit family and friends in England, Europe, America as well as the four corners of Ireland and was still doing so up until the time of the rape last year.
“Her greatest passion was gardening and she spent countless hours tending her plants and visiting famous gardens wherever she went.
“She relished all these pleasures with enthusiasm and engagement.
“It is true that she had, in recent years, become forgetful mislaid things and needed help in navigating any complicated paperwork but she was still able to drive her limited routes, to run her home and to function effectively on her own.
“She valued and was proud of her independence.
“All that capability was dramatically swept away almost overnight last June.
“The family is in no doubt that the rape by Simon McGinley led to a marked acceleration of her incipient dementia.
“It very quickly became clear that she could no longer function on her own, as before.
“She now needs someone to be with her at all times, to drive, shop, cook, clean – to effectively take over the running of her life.
“A second consequence of the rape has been an abiding fearfulness that is never far from my mother’s sense of her life now.
“The sight of an unfamiliar face, a man passing the kitchen window, an unexpected knock at the door can be a cause now of extreme anxiety for her.
“Fear is never far from the surface.
“Bad as these two consequences of the assault are, the most heartbreaking result is the loss of joy from my mother’s life.
“There has been a complete rupture with all the activities that gave her life pleasure and meaning.
“She is no longer interested in meeting with friends, no longer goes to mass, no longer travels and above all no longer cares about her garden.
“The spark that lit up her days has gone forever.
“Instead of the gradual, easeful decline into advanced years that her own parents had enjoyed, our mother was taken from the still golden phase of her life and thrust brutally into its terminal stages by Simon McGinley’s crime.”
One man did this. He destroyed two lives. And he doesn’t give a shit.

Genuflecting your way out of dodge.

2009-06-30T19:09:00.009+01:00

I loiter in the park across the road from the church, plucking up the necessary courage.
Eventually, after a few minutes’ prevarication, I know I have no choice. I come out of the park, cross the road and walk slowly through the car park of St. Joseph’s, my heart pounding.
Normally I don’t have a problem doing high profile funerals. Like most reporters who cover them, I have my own way of doing things - a technique that has stood by me and got me out of there in safety for more than a decade.
Some reporters look completely conspicuous at funerals, walking into the church with their eyes wide open in fear, a notebook in one hand, a pen in the other. They stick out like a sore thumb, especially when they congregate together. Like sheep.
I usually dress down, maybe in a shirt and jeans, rather than a suit. I’m not trying to show any disrespect to anyone - it’s just that I don’t want to look like a reporter. Some of my colleague joke that my undercover outfit actually makes me look like a cop. All I need is a doughnut, but I’ve had too many of them so I’ll pass on that.
In the church, I try to hide in plain view. I ignore my colleagues, and they do the same to me. I walk in, trying not to show any hesitation. Without breaking my stride, I focus on one pew and head for it, as if I know the church really well.
Then I sit there, surrounded by other mourners for the duration of the funeral mass. I have a small digital Dictaphone in my hand, which I turn on just before I enter the church. It stays on until I leave the church, usually at communion. With luck, nobody even notices me. Job done.
But the funeral of Patrick Eugene Holland was no normal funeral. And I was extremely nervous as I opened the door of St. Joseph’s Church in Bonnybrook, Coolock, north Dublin at 10.40am on Monday.
There were two main reasons for my trepidation.
I like to think that I’m anonymous, that nobody knows me. I’m not one of these high profile reporters whose name and photographs are everywhere. I don’t really do television, so I always think that I can walk down any street and nobody would recognise me.
But I received a phone call a few minutes before the funeral was about to begin. It let me know there was a problem. Photographers Mick O’Neill and Jim Walpole had both been assigned to cover the funeral. They had taken up positions in different areas, ready to shoot anyone who went in to the church. As I stood in the park, getting ready to go into the church, Mick rang me. He told me that some men who I really did not want to be there had just walked into the church.
Each of them would recognise me and each of them would be far from happy when they saw me.
Then there was the rest of the mourners. We knew it was going to be a small funeral, but not that small. There were only around 50 mourners - the church could easily hold 400. I knew there would be nowhere for me to hide.
But I knew I couldn’t stay away. The story was too big and there were at least three other reporters inside. I couldn’t let them get the scoop and go back empty handed to the office. Fear is a great motivator and I’m more afraid of failure than than I am of most criminals.
So I entered the church.
It went wrong as soon as I got to the door. It opened well enough, but when I tried to let it close smoothly (and quietly) behind me, it became stuck. I then spent what felt like hours trying to pull it closed.
When I turned around and faced the congregation, several people were staring at me - including the men who did not want me there. I felt their eyes boring into me.
But I’d come too far to stop. I started walking, heading to my right where a sea of pews awaited me. Like before, I tried to show no hesitation. I told myself when I was going in to turn right and that’s just what I did. The only problem was that the aisle I picked was empty; I was literally the only person on that side of the church. I thought, briefly, of stopping and heading to the centre aisle where most mourner were sitting. But I immediately ruled that out: it would have been far too conspicuous.
I picked a pew, genuflected, and sat down, glancing down at the Dictaphone hidden in my hands to make sure the red recording light was glowing red.
Fr Kevin Moore delivered a fine sermon.
Dutchy Holland was someone whom I interviewed in the Rome apartment of his lawyer Giovanni Di Stefano in April 2007. He was an immensely personable, likeable even, man.

Me interviewing Dutchy Holland in Rome. Copyright Irish Daily Star

I had a good chat with him for about an hour and it was only at the end that I knew he was a killer. I asked him if he had, as gardai are satisfied, killed Veronica Guerin. He replied simply: “No. No way.” But I could tell he was lying. He hadn’t even managed to convince himself he was innocent. So he’ll be remembered as the man who shot dead an Irish crime reporter to most people.
But not to his family.
As Fr Kevin said, they remember a loving, caring uncle and granduncle.
“Patrick’s instincts were always to be helpful to others,” he said.
“He enjoyed swimming and in his younger days saved a person from drowning by jumping in to save him.
“They recall the person that they knew and the good home and background from which he came.
“The fondness that they always had for him will linger on.”
Dutchy was loved by some people.
Just as we sat down after a Hail Mary, I felt my mobile phone vibrate in my pocket.
Because I was at the funeral and was trying to keep my head down, I was not going to answer it. But something, perhaps a sixth sense, made me take it out of my jeans pocket.
I looked at the message and froze.
It was from another reporter in the church. It simply said: “X and X have clocked you and look angry.”
Oh shit.
I put the phone back in my pocket, considered things for a millisecond and got up. There's no point in being a hero. Anyway, I had gotten what I went there for, the priest's sermon. Time to get out of dodge.
I left the pew, genuflected and walked calmly, but quickly, out of the church.
I didn’t look back until I was out of the church grounds. Then I snatched a quick glance to see if anyone had followed me out. There was nobody there.
I had parked my car about 500 metres away and made sure no-one was following me before I got into it and drove off.
It was only when I was about a mile away that I finally relaxed.
I knew I was safe. Until next time.

“I’m sorry. I’m truly, deeply, sorry.”

2009-06-07T22:54:00.001+01:00

“There he is Jim! There.”
“Where? Where?” Jim Walpole replies, looking in two directions at the same time as he instinctively brings his camera up, ready to shoot.
“He’s standing directly opposite us, on the other side of the road,” I say, nodding as subtly as I can towards our target, Martin Kirwan. Up until a few months ago, he was one of the senior commanders of the Irish Civil Defence; a real pillar of society. Today, however, he is up in front of Judge Patrick Clyne in court 46 of Dublin District Court at the Bridewell, beside the Four Courts complex. He is up on charges of indecently assaulting a young boy 20 years ago.
We really need his photograph. We’ve been waiting at the entrance to the court for almost an hour: now he’s in our sights. We have to get him.
I need not worry: the ever dependable Jim has him. “Okay. I see him. Don’t move. Stay there and don’t move an inch – I’m going to get him from here.” For once, my bulk comes in useful as Jim snaps Kirwan over my shoulder. The target didn’t see a thing: he’s too busy hugging three women, either friends or family, who are standing by him. Kirwan then walks towards us and Jim steps out of my shadow to hose him down. Kirwan doesn’t even break his stride. He keeps walking, ignoring Jim as he fires off shot after shot from just a few feet away.
We satisfy ourselves that the man we photographed is Kirwan. Jim’s work is done: mine is just about to begin.
I follow him into the court complex. I turn into the joint entrance to two courts, go up the stairs and turn right into 46. As soon as I walk in, I scan the body of the court for Kirwan. I quickly spot him, sitting on the second bench back, with his female supporters. A few moments later, Judge Clyne enters and it begins.
Kirwan was the first person on the list and his case is called quickly. But the acoustics inside court 46 are appalling and I struggle to hear what the judge is saying. As this is an indecent assault case, I’m expecting it to be held in camera. In this case, it means the public will be told to leave and only people directly connected to the hearing will be allowed to stay – and bona fide journalists. I hear the judge mention the phrase and get ready to show my press pass to prove I’m a working reporter.
But, rather than ordering the court to be cleared, the judge gets up and walks out, telling the court he should be back in five minutes. About 10 people walk after him, heading through a door to the right of the bench.
I quickly realise this is going to pose me a problem: the judge is going to hear the case in his chambers, rather than clearing a packed court. But how the hell am I going to get in? You can’t just walk into a judge’s private room...
As my panic mounts that I’m going to miss the whole thing, the Garda sergeant who accompanied the judge out of the court comes back in. I approach him and ask if I can cover the case. He goes back to the judge and, a few moments later, returns and asks me and another reporter for our ID. Once he’s happy, he leads us into the judge’s chamber.
I was thankful for two things: firstly that the judge let us in and, secondly, that I was there to witness one of the most moving and dignified and uplifting, but heartbreaking court cases that I’ve ever attended.
There were around 12 people in the small room. As soon as we walked in, the injured party said he was happy for the case to be covered and that he wanted Kirwan named in the media – but he wanted nothing printed that could identify him. I had to say a few words to the Judge, to assure him that we would abide by that. (I get nervous when a judge addresses me: the last time was about four years ago when my mobile phone went off in court. That was fun.) Once Judge Clyne was satisfied, the proceedings began.
Kirwan had pleaded guilty in a previous hearing to several counts of indecent assault on the then boy in 1988 and 1989.
Now it was the victim’s turn to talk.
He stood opposite the judge, dignified and proud in an immaculate suit. His wife stood right beside him, on his left, gently consoling him, being there for him. His mother sat down a few feet away from him, a family friend comforting her, braced for what she was about to hear.
The victim, now in his late 30s, tried not to cry as he described the devastating effect Kirwan’s abuse has had on him for the last 20 years. He tried to keep the tears at bay, but he simply couldn’t. The more he spoke, the more upset he got. He spoke of the trust that he felt for Kirwan as a child; how he felt privileged because Kirwan treated him as an adults; how Kirwan’s abuse led to him suffering depression for more than a decade.
All the time his mother was sitting, in tears, close by. It was hard enough to look at the victim, but almost impossible to look at his mother. What, I kept wondering, must she be thinking during this victim impact statement? How hard must it be for her to sit there and listen to her beloved son talking about how this man had abused him, not once, but several times. You can only imagine the pain she has felt and will continue to feel because of the actions of Kirwan, previously a highly regarded member of the community in Dunboyne, Co Meath, where the abuse took place.
Then Kirwan opened his mouth and said something that it looked like the victim and his family had been waiting more than two decades to hear: sorry.
“I’m truly, deeply sorry,” he said as the victim held his gaze.
He offered €3,000 in compensation – but the victim said he didn’t want his money, so it was split between One in Four and the ISPCC. He’ll be sentenced in November.
I think the victim got something much more important than money that day: validation.
I’ve spoken to loads of victims of abuse over the year and they are always eager for the abuser to be named – and perhaps shamed - in the media. Looking at this case, it suddenly hit me why. The abuse that children suffer is always in secret, hidden away so that only the victim and the perpetrator know about it: one is either to afraid or ashamed to talk about it, the other is not going to tell anybody what he is doing.
So the abuser’s reputation is untrammelled: they are often pillars of society, like Kirwan. Only the victims know the truth. All the time the victim is being abused, or suffering the horrendous after effects of the abuse, the abuser is well regarded in his community. That’s why the victims oftentimes seek the abuser to be named. They want the world to know what they – and only they – have known for so long: that the person who abused them was not the saint that everyone thought.

That's a really stupid question

2009-05-04T16:50:00.006+01:00

THE mobile buzzes gently to let me know I have a message.
I pick it up and have a look, hoping it’s a contact with a good story.
No such luck. Instead it is from a colleague who was with me at a press conference held by the Garda Representative Association in Killarney, Co Kerry a few hours earlier.
He was listening to the recording he made of the conference – and felt compelled to tell me how much of a muppet I was.
“Just listening bak to my tape,” the text said, “Why do u ask so many stupid questions? I know ur stupidity levels are out of ur control, but please reduce number of questions. Thank you.”
I thought this was actually a tremendously funny text and you really need to know the personality of the texter to realise the spirit in which it was sent. I just laughed and showed it to everyone. They laughed as well.
At least he said thank you. And he probably had a point on this occasion; I suppose I did hog the press conference somewhat.
But it was one of the few times my career where I can think of the two things in which I am interested most – crime and languages – were together. I was always fascinated by crime and studied Italian and French at university, so the press conference obviously attracted my interest. (As an aside, I’d strongly advise any young person who wants to be a reporter to study languages. It opens up a lot of doors. And if you speak a language, you’ll get foreign gigs much more often than some hack who relies on speaking loudly and slowly in English to a Spanish cop or Italian politician. My language skills have got me to some weird and wonderful locations I would otherwise never have seen were it not for work. I also think foreign language training helps with your journalese.)
The speaker at the presser was Detective Garda Tom O’Sullivan, who is attached to the Interpol National Central Bureau at Garda HQ in Phoenix Park. He’s also a qualified interpreter and translator; so he clearly knows his stuff.
He was worried that there was no vetting in their home countries of foreign interpreters working for gardai in Ireland: there’s not much point checking them on the Irish system without being able to confirm that they are conviction free in whatever part of the world they come from.
He was also concerned at the possibility that foreign gangs could plant members of their outfit into a Garda station as an interpreter. That stands to reason. If there are no checks in someone’s own country, it’s quite clear the system is open to abuse. His points were well made. I hope I didn’t bore him too much.
But I did ask more than my fair share of questions, hence my colleague’s kind text message.
Like most newspaper reporters, I tend not to ask too many questions at press conferences. In my line of work, the pressers I attend are usually after murders. I, and other paper people, usually leave the questions to the broadcasters. They need quotes from the local superintendent, or chief, for the TV or radio. They need the basics: the what, when and where of the murder for their next broadcast. They have to be there for that – we lazy paper reporters can simply lift those details from the news. There’s not much point in asking the who or why at any press conference. They won’t tell you. So it’s much better to speak to someone off the record, and away from the cameras, for the really important information. In addition, broadcasters like to be seen, and heard, asking the questions – I think their editors believe that helps their station brand. That’s fair enough.
And, sometimes, you don’t have any questions to ask. It’s actually hard, particularly at the start of your career to ask questions of someone, especially in authority. Sometimes your mind goes blank, followed by your face turning red.
Also, you really have to be fully prepared before asking some people questions – any weakness and your part and you target will turn on you. The two people I prepared most before I rang them were Ian Paisley Junior and President Mary McAleese, when she was a law professor at Queen’s University of Belfast in the mid 1990s. They were both the same. They let you ask a question and then demolished you if there was any wriggle room, or mistake, in what you had put to them. It was great training, however. You soon learned to stop asking silly questions.
For me, the worst I ever heard of was in the aftermath of a gangland murder last year in Dublin. There was a press conference the next day, a Saturday, so I wasn’t there. But a pal rang me a short time afterwards, convulsed with laughter. The victim had been shot as he enjoyed a pint in a pub, before the killers fled.
In the scrum of the press conference the next day, the Super was fielding the usual questions, when a hack asked him: “So, did the killers make an immediate escape?” What did the reporter think the gunmen did, have a pint themselves before casually strolling out of the pub?
Sometimes it’s better not to stick your head above the parapet at a press conference – or you’ll get a text like I did at the GRA.

I spy with my little eye...

2009-04-05T23:09:00.002+01:00

A sudden movement in the rear view mirror catches my eye. A car is coming towards us from behind. It weaves from left to right as it drives up the road, coming to a stop a few feet behind us. I turn around and look. It takes a few instants for my brain to figure out that the writing on the bonnet – ECILOP in thick blue lettering – is supposed to be read in a mirror.
“Oh Shit, Mick,” I hiss at my colleague, photographer Mick O’Neill. He’s sitting in the back of the people carrier. “What?” he asks. He still keeps his eyes on our target, a building 100 yards away on a road that snakes away from the one where we are sitting. “It’s the cops.” I say. “Oh. Right,” he says, calmly. I feel my face burning. I hate cops coming up to you when you are on a stake-out. You never know whether they are going to say `cool’ and leave us at it – or tell us they’ll arrest us if we don’t move on. We’ve had complaints, you know.
The complaint came from a local citizen. As the cops grilled us in a polite and friendly way, he lurked at his driveway, about 10 yards away.
It came as no surprise that the cops were on to us. We’d been sitting at the same spot for, by that stage, three days, or around 36 hours. In the movies, you can do a stake-out for that length of time with no problem – in the real world, you’re spotted within minutes. After that, it’s only a question of whether people confront you themselves, or call the police: in this case it was both.
Mick and I were in Locks Heath, a suburb of Southampton. We were looking for Bob Campion, the third leg of the ménage a trois involving David Bourke and Jean Gilbert. While we were there, the jury in Bourke’s murder trial was out, considering its verdict. Campion had not come over to Ireland for the trial; we knew we had to get him. By the time we got there on the Friday, he’d already down an exclusive sit-down interview with The Irish Daily Mail and, as it turned out, the Irish Independent used a local agency to get a few words with him. No pressure, so.
The only problem was there was no sign of him when we arrived. After about four hours sitting 30 odd yards from his ground floor flat, I lost the head and decided to knock. There was no space for Mick to get a photo as the flat is surrounded by trees and a shed. But at least we’d know if he was there. Foremost in my mind was the fact that we’d be wasting time and money if we camped out here – and he was not. Or worse, just say some paper had bought him up and he was enjoying some hotel somewhere, while we were sitting outside his flat in a rented Zafira for days on end.
But when I knocked, there was no sign of him and it looked as of the flat was deserted. So we settled down to wait. And wait. And wait. And then wait some more.
People started no give us strange looks after around 30 minutes. I was in the driver’s seat; Mick in the back. Mick looking towards the flat complex, me looking in the rear view mirror, just in case. At first, people simply walked past, assuming we were workmen or visitors to other houses. Then, when they came back, they saw we were still there and, understandibly, became suspicious. Nobody approached us on day one: we were there from midday to 11pm. Nor was there any sign of Campion.
The next day, we got there at 4.30am. We had learned that Campion did night work, so we had to get there early, just in case he finished his shift at that time. We parked up, just as dawn was breaking. Nothing. Not a thing all day. By 8pm, the night had come – Mick remarked it was the first time he’s ever seen the dawn and dusk in the same job. I had to agree. We’d whiled away the hours listening to radio, talking crap and constantly scanning the area for Campion. We'd even played I Spy. I won hands down. I broke his serve when I guessed AV was the air vent on an old people’s home opposite us. He couldn’t get D for daffodils, either.
At around 3pm a neighbour approached us. “Curiosity has got the better of me...” “Ah,” I said. “We’re journalists from Ireland and we’re here hoping to talk to a man who lives down there,” I said, pointing to Campion’s flat. “He hasn’t done anything wrong, but he has been mentioned in a high profile murder case. He was the boyfriend of a woman who was killed by her husband. We just want to give him an opportunity to talk to us. But we have to wait for him to come...” “That’s fine,” he smiled. “Very interesting, actually. A murder case, you say. How exciting.”
So the hours passed. The neighbour would occasionally come out of his house, see us and nod conspiratorially towards us.
We were back the next day, a Sunday, at the same time. By 1pm we were going out of our minds with boredom, so the arrival of the second man at least broke the tedium.
I lowered the window and greeted him. “Hello,” he said. “I’m the local neighbourhood watch secretary and I just wonder what you are doing here. You have been noticed by a good few people...”
I went through the rigmarole of explanation. He then asked me for ID – something at which I silently bridled. There’s only one group in society to whom I have to show credentials – police. Everyone else can kindly go away. I made an exception in this case – hoping that would placate him and he wouldn’t call the boys in blue. I grudgingly showed him my card.
He nodded and walked away. But 15 minutes later the cops arrived. Mr Neighbourhood Watch had tried to contact my newsroom on the numbers on my card: the only problem was the numbers were Irish and did not have the international code. Hence him not getting through.
The police were actually fine. They took our details, listened to our story and said we weren’t doing anything wrong. Mr Neighbourhood Watch sidled up as we were talking to the police. He made some comment to officer before turning round – and walking straight into a lamppost.
“Now that’s Karma,” I said to the cop, who stifled a laugh.
The cops went away and we waited some more. It was actually the Monday, after 48 hours watching, that Campion emerged. “There he is,” Mick shouted. He hosed him down with his camera from the car, loosing off maybe 30 shots. When he gave the go ahead, certain that he had good pics, I got out of the car and approached him. “Mr Campion, I’m a journalist from Ireland...” “Good for you,” he said and kept walking.
But I managed to persuade him to talk, even though he kept walking up the road. All the while, Mr Neighbourhood Watch was watching from a distance – roaring at us to leave Campion alone.
But the wait was worth it. It always is.

“I can’t face that. I can’t. I can’t even think about that.”

2009-03-22T21:17:00.006Z

As she gets out of the car, I softly shake her hand. I thank her for the interview and tell her I’m going to say a little prayer for her daughter. She smiles, sadly, nods her head and walks away.
I sit back into the car. My colleague Gary Ashe is doing the driving. After a few seconds, he glances over at me and says: “She’s way past the crying stage, isn’t she?” “Yeah,” I reply quietly. We drive on, heading to our hotel, job done. Audrey Fitzpatrick walks into the bar and back to her search for her little girl. Back to her living nightmare.
Gary was right. Audrey was indeed way past the crying stage. It’s more than a year since her daughter Amy Fitzpatrick disappeared as she walked home from a friend’s house in Calahonda, near Fuengirola on Spain’s Costa Del Sol. In the 14 months since her disappearance, Audrey has campaigned tirelessly – desperately - for Amy; for her not to be forgotten. But there has been nothing in return. No sightings; no phone calls; no emails; no sign of life.
But still she goes on with her campaign. Always fighting. Always available. She agreed to meet me and Gary with only half an hour’s notice. We were in Spain last week on another matter – the unsuccessful appeal of Dermot McArdle – around 200 kilometres from Calahonda in the city of Granada, at this court. But we were flying out of Malaga, which was only 30 odd minutes from Audrey, so I gave her a call to see if she would facilitate us with a quick interview. You can never tell when you make such a call: some people won’t be interested, others will be happy to talk.
As soon as I introduced myself over the phone, I knew Audrey would talk to us. She readily agreed to meet us half an hour later in Tricky Ricky’s pub, a de facto HQ forn the Amy campaign. When we got there, she was standing at the bar with a friend. She gave us a big smile and told us she was delighted we had called – anything, she said, to keep Amy’s name in the papers.
But she admitted it’s getting increasingly more difficult to keep the campaign going. Neither she nor her partner, Dave Mahon, have been able to work since Amy disappeared, but they have spent a fortune. “How much?” I ask. “Oh, easily over €200,000,” she replies. She tells me that Dave was able to check his mobile phone and see that he alone has spent €10,000 on credit for it since January 2008.
They had a decent amount of savings, but now they are in serious trouble. Dave is trying to get back into work, but his field – property – is even more badly hit in Spain than in Ireland. They have not paid their €2,000 a month mortgage since Amy vanished – and now the bank have warned them they are in real danger of losing their house.
That would be, she says, devastating on two counts: firstly, no one wants to lose their home. But, probably more importantly, it’s Amy’s home. “I am really desperate to keep the house because Amy could walk back in at any second,” Audrey insisted.
She was telling us this as Gary drive us back to the pub. Minutes earlier, we had taken Audrey to the spot where Amy was last seen, moments after leaving her friend’s house in New Year’s Night. It was obviously distressing for her, but she managed to pose with a poster of Amy for us.
But you can only imagine what was going through her head as she stood at the spot where her young daughter was walking when somebody took her, for that's what probably happened. The likelihood of Amy running away and not being in contact with friends or family is too unrealistic to even contemplate. And as I looked at her graciously posing for Gary, a single thought kept bouncing around my head: how could any parent deal with things Audrey is having to deal with?
How can she function on a day to day basis not knowing where her girl is? She must just be on auto pilot. The agony must be unbearable. Every waking minute, second,is taken up with looking for Amy.
Which is worse, I wondered: the thought that something horrible has happened to Amy –or the fear that something horrible is still happening to her. Both must be unbearable.I asked Audrey, somewhat nervously, if she had accepted the possibility that Amy could be dead. “No,” she said, quickly. “I can’t face that.
I can’t. I can’t even think about that.”
Instead, she is convinced that someone, perhaps someone who knew her, has taken her. She is hoping against hope that the person still has her and will let her free one day.
Maybe events more than 1500 kilometres north east will prove her right: maybe you never should give up hope.
It was nothing more than a coincidence, but while we were talking to Audrey, Josef Fritzl was in the dock in the Austrian town of St. Poelten. It was the Tuesday of Fritzl’s trial when we met Audrey. On that day, Elizabeth Fritzl’s video evidence was played to the jury, so some of the shocking details had emerged by the time Audrey spoke to us.
For me the parallels were stomach churning. As we drove away from meeting her, and after Gary’s comments, all I could think about was this: just say some fucker has Amy in a dungeon somewhere? Just say that poor, defenceless, girl is going through the same hell that Elizabeth suffered? A shiver went down my spine at even the thought of it.
And, as we drive away under the Spanish sun, I say a silent prayer for Amy.

“We’re an army fighting an army.”

2009-03-08T23:00:00.008Z

He sits across from me in the quiet pub. He has a soft and friendly face. After only a few minutes chatting I can tell he’s the sort of fella with whom, in normal circumstances, you’d quite happily shoot the breeze as you drink a pint. I wouldn’t go as far as saying that I actually l liked him, but the truth is I got on famously with him. We connected with each other. We could have been friends in other circumstances.
But these weren’t normal circumstances.
The man facing me was far from being a normal person. He was actually a leading member of the Real IRA and he was telling me why he was fighting his war. And all the time, when he’s explaining to me why it’s necessary to take the war to the British, why the Sinn Fein leadership can’t call themselves republicans, why they are the real IRA and why he’ll keep on at it as long as is necessary, there’s one thought swirling through my head. As I listen to him I just keep thinking `how can this guy be so, well, normal?’ He should have two heads or something.
It had taken me months to get to meet him.
It was early 2003 and my friend John Mooney and I were working on our book, Black Operations, the secret war against the Real IRA, at the time. We could have taken the relatively easy way out and relied on the police on either side of the border for our information. We, especially John, had gotten a lot out of the good guys, but we both knew we needed more. We knew there was no point writing about the Real IRA unless we spoke to them.
I’d long had a professional interest in them. After the Omagh bomb in August 1998, they rang me to declare firstly their responsibility for the atrocity and then, a few hours later, a ceasefire. I can still hear the tinny voice – caused by a distorter – as the anonymous caller gave me the statement. When I started to ask him questions, the cheeky fucker simply said: “Michael, we picked you because we thought you wouldn’t ask us anything.” Thanks a bunch.
But receiving a phone call from a paramilitary organisation is one thing: getting to meet a representative face to face is another. How could we get them to talk? There was no secret formula; all we could do was work and work and work until someone agreed to meet us. We went at them from the outside. We spoke to one person who came to trust us. He let another person know we were sound. Finally, after months, he told me to expect a call from someone else.
The call eventually came late on a Thursday, I recall.
It was a private number and he told me his name. It actually wasn’t his name, but the name I had been waiting for. “I understand you want to meet.” “Yes.” “Okay, I’ll see you at 10.30am on Saturday. Be outside XXXXX.” “Grand. How will I know who to meet?” “I’ll know you.” The phone then went dead.
I arrived 10 minutes early. I stood waiting outside the pub in Dublin, nervously scanning the street to see if anyone coming towards me looked like a terrorist. Then I noticed movement to my left. Stupidly, I hadn’t checked the pub itself. He came out of it, quietly called my name and beckoned me in.
As I sat opposite him, I quickly sized him up. Jesus, I thought, he looks like a regular head.
What he was saying, however, was miles away from regular. In a quite well known suburban pub, we spoke about the creation of the organisation, why they split from the Provos in late 1997. He told me of Garda Special Branch bursting in on him and getting him to the ground at gunpoint, his arms behind his back. He spoke somewhat unkindly of one cop I knew –although naturally I didn’t let him know I knew the detective: he really didn’t like him.
He was an extremely articulate man. He told me that, for more than a decade, the IRA had not been killing for the Republic. He and others had seen the writing on the wall for that long. They knew the Provos were shaping up for a settlement well short of a United Ireland. What, he asked, was the point in killing for anything less than a 32 county republic?
He really did believe he was a soldier. More, he believed he was a senior commander of the only, real, army in Ireland. I clearly remember him saying that the strategy was changing from bombs (like Omagh) to killing a soldier. “We’re an army fighting an army,” he said. “We should be taking them on. How better to show that we don’t accept them being here than to go after them?”
The years passed and the meeting – and another I had with him – faded in the memory. Once the book was done, I moved on. Sure, the RIRA were largely a spent force. I concentrated on reporting in drugs, paedophilia and husbands killing their wives. I merely cast an occasional glance at them. I thought, stupidly, they were finished as a force.
All that changed on Saturday night.
John Mooney, who has kept up a professional interest in the RIRA, rang me late in the evening to tell me what had happened in Antrim. I was shocked. He wasn’t. Coincidentally, a few hours earlier he had filed a piece for the Irish edition of the Sunday Times warning the dissidents were intent on shooting members of the security forces. And then the memory of my meeting with the senior man came back to me – especially his belief, hope even, that British soldiers should be targeted.
Most people in Ireland will have been horrified by what happened on Saturday night. But some, maybe even him, will probably be celebrating in a pub tonight.

Who's the rat?

2009-03-02T15:08:00.002Z

He’ll have to go back one day.
He’ll have to walk in and attempt to get back down to work and concentrate on whatever tasks are assigned to him. He’ll have to try, somehow, to put to the back of his mind the terror that has been visited upon him just because he happens to work there
But, most of all, Shane Travers will have to ignore the fact that somewhere in the College Green branch of the Bank of Ireland is the person who betrayed him.
And what’s worse, he won’t have a clue who it is. It could be the guy who passes him on the corridor; it could be the woman who stands a few feet away from him as he goes outside for some air. It could be just about anybody.
Someone in that building is directly responsible for what happened to Shane Travers last Thursday. He, or she, is directly responsible for his girlfriend Stephanie Smith, her mother Joan and nephew Stephen being held at gunpoint, tied up, bundled into a van and dumped in an abandoned house in Co Meath.
Someone, somewhere, in that building sold out his or her colleagues for probably a few hundred grand.
When the dust dies down over the massive Tiger kidnapping last week, when we’ve all largely forgotten about it, Shane Travers will still have to face his demons. He will, unless he is posted somewhere else in the bank, have to work in the same building as the person who set him up. That will be tough – he’s bound to be looking more closely than ever before at everyone who works there, wondering was he or she the one?
As the Garda investigation continues into the raid, officers are fighting several fires at the same time. They are obviously desperate to get their hands on the rest of the €7.6 million that was stolen in the raid. They recovered some €1.8 million when they stopped a car after a chase on the M50 late on Friday night. It was some feat to get any of the money back within such a short period of time - but it means almost €6 million of new and unused Euro notes are still out there.
The Garda units will also be trying to gather enough evidence for the robbers themselves to be charged.
They’re one of the most vicious and prolific in Dublin. They’re all young men, in their 20s, and some of them have a fearsome reputation for violence. In one instance recently one of the 10 or so people involved in the gang even followed a Garda to his home and poured acid on his car, before leaving two shotgun cartridges on the vehicle. If they do that to a Garda, what would they have done to Shane Travers if he put up a fight?
But another key element of the Garda probe will be to get the rat in the bank.
It’s inconceivable that the gang had no internal help in this one – they simply knew too much about the bank. Not only did they know where Shane Travers lived, but they also had key details on other workers in the vault. For example, they gave Mr Travers photographs of the homes of several of his colleagues to show them when he went in to the bank on Friday morning. And they also gave him a photograph they had of one of his bosses. The not so subtle message was clear: if the money is not handed over, we are all in trouble.
That is one explanation why the tight security procedures within the bank were not followed on Friday morning – it wasn’t just one worker who feared for his life; it was all of them.
The gangs and the gardai have been fighting a war for the best part of a decade when it comes to banks and cash. When the criminals carried out good old fashioned armed robberies in branches, the banks invested significant resources in upgrading security there. So then the robbers targeted cash in transit vans – and Achilles heel in terms of security. So, again, the security companies reacted by beefing up security there. Then it was the turn of the criminals to target the weakest link of any security system: the people who use it. Vulnerable security staff were targeted in their own homes and ordered to drop off cash – or else their loved ones would be harmed. Again, cash companies reacted by bringing in new security systems. In the case of security vans, for example, money can only be released centrally, staff have no access to cash and the vehicle itself is monitored by satellite.
When it comes to banks, like College Green, a single employee can’t simply walk in and take out €7.6 million in hard cash. There are other layers of security that will prevent that. Well, that was the theory – but last week showed criminal gangs can be cunning as well as vicious.
They knew they’d fail if they targeted Travers alone. So they encouraged his colleagues to cooperate by informing them they were in just as much danger as he was. The Bank was just lucky the gang didn’t get away with more cash: they gave him four laundry bags, which he filled with €7.6 million. If they’d given him more bags, he’d have filled them too. There was around €100 million in the vault – God knows how much they could have gotten away with.
While gardai are hopeful that they have enough evidence to charge suspects in relation to the incident tonight, it’s clear there are people out there who were heavily involved in this who have not been arrested. They’re sitting back, waiting for the fuss to die down, waiting for the time they can move the cash out of Ireland. All the notes are new, so it will have to be laundered abroad. But, even if they only get one third of their face value, it’s still a huge amount of money.
And there’ll be one bank employee who will be waiting to get a significant cut in return for an act of treachery – unless the gardai come knocking first.

Now you weren't talking to me, right?

2009-02-18T23:00:00.013Z

He sees me just before I see him.
I’m trudging to the front gate of the court complex; he’s walking towards me, sandwiched by two fellow detectives. He’s chatting away with his buddies, but he’s looking in my direction. We’re only 50 odd feet or so away from each other. He’s laughing, but I can see his eyes nervously darting towards me, then away, then back. Then away again. And his pals are looking at me a bit too intently for my liking. Do they know? Have they found out? Or are they just thinking `there’s that prick’?
This is not good. I haven’t told anybody. But has he? I can feel the blood rushing to my face as the space between us is eaten up. Oh Shit. What’ll I do? Will I ignore him? Will I raise my eyebrows subtly as we pass – hoping that nobody notices? Will I just say hello? Don’t be ridiculous. Fuck, what if he says hello to me? I could just turn tail and run...He’s only 20 feet away from me now. This is tricky. Very tricky. I make the wrong decision and we’re finished. Think, for Christ’s sake, think! They’re only a few feet away now. They go quiet as they near.
Then, from somewhere, an idea: a coward’s way out.
Just a few paces before we draw level, I bend down and pretend to tie my lace. In an instant, they are past me. Nothing is said. I get up, shake the dust of my knee and walk in to court. As I enter the packed and claustrophobic Court 45 in the Bridewell complex, just across from the Four Courts, my mobile phone vibrates silently. I take it out of my pocket, look at the message: Dat ws close. Gud tinkin batman! Dose uder 2 tink ur a prik by de way. I smile to myself, happy. Relieved.
Welcome to the world of trying to keep your contacts secret.
Political reporters can be seen having lattes with their TD and spin doctor mates in Leinster House; sports stars, of all codes, are known to have their favourite hacks (or fans with typewriters as I call them when I’m drunk); business journalists go for expensive lunches with their confidantes in the best, most conspicuous, restaurants. And don’t even start me about entertainment reporters...
Crime reporters, on the other hand, ignore some of their best friends when they walk past them in the street.
You could be standing beside one of your best contacts, say in back of a courtroom, and nobody would have a clue. Absolutely nobody. In fact, by the contact’s body language, you’d think the reporter just asked him if his wife accepted all major credit cards. Contempt is one word for what's on the garda's face. Which is great. The last thing you want is any other mule looking over, putting two and two together and getting four. The more members who think the fella beside me thinks I’m a bollox, the better.
And, above all, you never name your contacts in your copy. It’s all about keeping things as vague as possible to protect your people. They could be jailed, fined and sacked if anyone found out, so you’ve got to do everything you can to keep the relationship a secret. In your copy, you’ll say sources, or insiders. You won’t even write detectives or Garda sources – you have to keep it as vague as possible.
In a perfect world, you’d be able to name every garda who give you information for your story. Look at America. Cops there are happy to tell you everything you need to know about a case. They’ll even spell out their name for you, so it goes in the paper properly. In many cases, reporters actually work out of police stations and are given the same incident reports that the local chief of police receives. Anyway, you’re not looking for something that will wreck an investigation: all you want is a few details that will give your readers the impression you actually know what you are talking about. The name of a murder victim would be nice. Or an age, even. An address would be heaven.
But this is not America. Everything is hush-hush. Everything is secret – especially the details of people who talk to us.
So we call them sources. And nobody is satisfied by that.
I got thinking about the whole issue of using the word “sources” a few weeks ago, when I was asked to speak to a meeting of the Press Council of Ireland on the subject.
There were several speakers and probably around 30 people in the room altogether. It was all on off the record, so I can’t go into detail into who said what. But I came away from the meeting on the defensive and depressed.
The impression I got from many attendees at this seminar was that when readers see the word sources in a newspaper they just don’t believe it. Many people see sources and think it’s all made up. I can understand that. There are a few reporters I have no faith in at all. I look at their pieces and ask myself why I can’t get my Garda contacts to speak in such flawless, fluent, journalese like they do?
There was one sort of row when a few people said the word sources should be used in copy where there was no official confirmation to back up the thrust of the story. So, instead of Michael O’Toole will tomorrow be charged with crimes against journalism, it should read Michael O’Toole will tomorrow be charged with crimes against journalism, sources have revealed. The argument was this: if the term sources is appended to the article, the reader will realise it has not been officially confirmed and decide to believe or disbelieve it on that basis. One person insisted that a paper should be able to write the story without any official or unofficial sourcing.
I thought that was nonsense. People need to know that what is written in the paper is confirmed officially, or not.
I use the word sources every day. If I have credibility as a reporter, people will believe that what I am writing is accurate. If I don’t, they won’t. Simple as that. If I have no credibility I am toast.
In the seminar, I was aghast when I heard how one reporter in a broadsheet newspaper was challenged by a superior about a quote attributed to a source. Incredibly, the reporter admitted to not having spoken to the source – and then said `that’s what they would have said if I had spoken to them’. Jesus Christ almighty. If a broadsheet journalist would do that, what hope is there for the rest of us?
And then I realised something. It's not about the paper, it's about the reporter. I know some great reporters who happen to work in tabloids. I know how thorough they are and I believe something when they write it. On the other hand, there are some broadhseet reporters I would not trust as far as I could throw.
Sources is an entirely unsatisfactory term. It’s the chancer journalist’s get out of jail card. They can make up what they want and put it down to sources. Everybody knows it goes on. There’s nothing we can do to stop it.
But there are people out their working their nuts off every day and promising potential and current contacts one simple thing: Nobody will know I was talking to you.
So that’s why we use the word sources. And pretend to tie our shoelaces in the street.

Wrong place, wrong time.

2009-02-09T23:58:00.004Z

Sometimes you can just be unlucky.
You take the wrong turn; you walk down the wrong street; you bump into the wrong person; you get into the wrong car. Through no fault of your own, you are just unlucky. Afterwards, if you survive, you try to rationalise things, ask yourself why what happened to you happened. Was it your fault? Did you look at that person the wrong way? Did you not see the warning signs? Did you not listen to your instinct? But the reality is occasionally there is no explanation bar the obvious one: you were just unlucky.
Sometimes crime is just horrifically random.
It would be comforting in a way if there was a logical explanation for every major crime committed in this country. I remember a few years ago talking to a senior Garda officer who told me something very interesting over a pint. We were chatting about the murder rate and he told me that there had been a certain number of homicides in Ireland the previous year. I can’t be more precise at the moment as some of the cases are still sub judice, but let’s say there were 55 murders that year. He asked me in how many of them did I think there was no link, of any sort, between the victim and the aggressor. By link he meant mother, husband, friend, neighbour, or even the fact that the victim was in one drugs gang and the killer was linked to another. I guessed, not unreasonably in my opinion, about 20.
The answer was actually two.
In only two cases that year had gardai been unable to find a link of any kind between the victim and the aggressor. So, in other words, there were only two real stranger murders in Ireland that year. As it happens, the victims were both women, both victims of a sex killer.
So both those women were unlucky. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time when the killer took them. They’d never met their killer before, never even laid eyes on him. But, in each case, he saw her and went for her. They were both random murders. The killers could have chosen any woman in each case: their victims were just unlucky.
The whole idea of the randomness was brought home to me, again, while reading this truly horrible case. The poor victim was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was on a night out with her boyfriend, needed to use a toilet and to the local Supermac’s in Nenagh. It was just her horrendous, truly horrendous, luck that a beast was waiting for a woman in the toilets. The ordeal he subjected the woman to in the toilets is simply unimaginable.
I know people sometimes read about rapes like this, or a murder, and search for a rational explanation. Understandably, they try to attach meaning to the meaningless because they don’t want to believe that it could happen to them or their loved ones.
I’ve covered too many random murders and rapes to even think of rationalising them. The suffering of the victim in these cases is, of course, not any more valid than the suffering of people who knew their killer or know their rapist. But, for some reason, it is these random attacks that stay with me. I know they’ll stay with me forever. It must be the whole idea that, but for a shitty bit of fate, the victims’ lives would have been so completely different.
And it’s particularly bad when it comes to young people. Young kids who had so much hope in their eyes, cruelly snuffed out because of bad luck.
I think of Siobhan Hynes and Alan Higgins a lot. Even now, years after their murders, I can still see their faces as I type. Look at the photographs of them, you can see the bright light of hope in their eyes. They literally have their whole life ahead of them as they smile, innocently, at the camera. If they had lived, they’d both be mature adults by now, they’d probably be fretting about the recession, just like the rest of us. But they didn’t get a chance to grow. Both their lives were snuffed out just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Siobhan Hynes, a beautiful young girl, met her death because – like the Nenagh rape victim – she stopped off in a fast food joint to go to the toilet. There she had the misfortune to meet one of the most evil people I’ve ever seen in a courtroom. John McDonagh was animal. He gave her a brutal death, stripping her of all dignity, before throwing her in the sea. A few days after his conviction, I tracked down a prostitute he attacked before the murder. Even then, years later, you could still see the fear in her face. She was lucky to survive him. Siobhan was unlucky. She died just a week after her 17th birthday. She’d be 27 now.
Alan Higgins, a young man who had beaten Leukaemia as a child, had a great future ahead of him. He came from a decent family in Donaghmede and wanted to be an architect. He was at the cinema with his girlfriend and had just said goodnight to her when another youngster – younger than him – robbed him of his mobile. He died after being stabbed in the struggle.
Two vibrant, optimistic, people gone. No explanation. No reason.
They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Irish Times Weekend piece on Mick Moran

2009-02-08T11:25:00.002Z

This is an interview carried out by Mary Minihan in the Weekend section of The Irish Times.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2009/0207/1233867924633.html

There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.

2009-02-02T13:12:00.045Z

You can't escape the screams.
You can clamp shut your eyes, turn your back on the screen, scurry to the other end of the room, do plenty to get away from the images. But there's nothing you can do to get the screams out of your head.
At first, it was only the baby's wails of agony that pierced the silence, but then I noticed I was hearing another another person screaming. And then I realised it was me. Horrific is a word I over use: but this was horrific. It's the only way of describing what was in front of me. Even now, more than a year after seeing what I saw, I'm still haunted by the video. The truth is I didn't, couldn't, watch the whole thing. I managed only to look, with my eyes peeking through my fingers, for a few seconds before running away. But no matter where I went in that room, the screams chase after me. Both his and mine.
The baby could not be more than six months old. The man standing over him is his `father'. In the grainy video, it's clear to see what the father is doing to his baby boy. Your instinct is to smash through the screen and rescue the infant, beat five colours of shit out of the fucker who is doing those things to him and take the baby in your arms to protect him. And when you've done that, kick his father again. Just to make sure.
But, of course, there's nothing you can do except close your eyes and run away.
The video my colleague Jim Walpole and I saw was played for us inside one of the warren of rooms of the Interpol headquarters in Lyon, southern France. It was just one of a number of images a Garda officer, Detective Sergeant Michael Moran, showed us that day. It was a week or so after D/Sgt Moran - on secondment from the Garda Siochana with Interpol - had hit the headlines over Operation Vico.
The Criminal Intelligence Officer coordinated the international hunt for Neil, who photographed himself abusing young kids in south east Asia. Neil, a Canadian, got what was coming to him late last year when he was jailed in Thailand for abusing the kids. We were there to give Mick a Star/TV3 Best of Irish Award. In return, he gave us a brief glimpse of hell.
Mick keeps an outsized pair of headphones in his office. It's not so that he can listen to his bad music in peace. It's because people walking along the corridor outside his office complained about the sounds of babies and children crying as they were being abused in the videos Mick has to watch every day. Next time you think your job is tough, think of Mick and think again.
This is one of his favourite quotes: "There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter." Hemingway wrote that. It sums up perfectly Mick's job. Catching animals like Neil must be one hell of a buzz. Mick searches he internet for images of child abuse. he looks at each photo or video for clues that help him track down not only the victim but also the abuser. They're the bad days. The good days are when he gets to see shits like Neil caught. He recalled to me and Jim how he encountered Neil in the Thai police station after he was arrested. Mick was the only other Westerner there and Neil foolishly thought he could bond with the no nonsense Meath man. He looked up at him and shrugged his shoulders as if to say `This is a bit of a mess'. Mick just stared at him and didn't say a word. Neil looked away.

(This photo, taken by Jim Walpole, shows Mick Moran at his desk in Interpol. Note the Irish flag at the forefront and those outsized headphones behind him on the wall. I've crudely hidden what was on his computers. You don't want to know. © The Irish Daily Star.)

The little baby was called Baby Hee. What we were watching was an infamous video of child, baby, abuse. D/Sgt Moran occasionally uses it when giving talks to law enforcement personnel around the world on the reality of what he deals with on a day to day basis. He assured me my reaction was not unique. For the record, the father got caught. He's in jail in central Europe, but will be released soon. At least the baby was rescued.
And it wasn't only Baby Hee. There was a young girl who her father persuaded to do unspeakable poses for the camera. The smile on his face as she does his evil bidding was obscene. He was caught as he prepared to swap her with another paedophile's daughter. Both girls were rescued.
Looking at the images (which I have to say make you sick to the stomach for the abuse that is being perpetrated in them but also because it's mostly fathers doing it to their own kids and putting the pictures on the Internet) was a deeply distressing experience. I wasn't the same for weeks. It still affects me now.
But, as well as the infernal visions, I took something else away from that trip to Lyon; something much more important.
It was a new determination not to refer to these monstrous images as child pornography. That, to Mick Moran and many others, equates child rape photos to adult pornography. That is, almost always, modeled by men and women who, for whatever reason, voluntarily do what they do. The term child pornography almost softens the obscene.
But with these defenceless young kids, there's nothing voluntary. The reality is they're forced into it by people who have complete control over them. Not only do they abuse them, but they then get their kicks by bragging to other paedophiles and swapping the images with each other. Interpol, and other police agencies, prefer the term child abuse imagery.
Having seen what I saw that October day in Lyon, I can understand why.

Grime, ink

2009-01-24T16:07:00.032Z

I'm wet, miserable and under pressure. The ditch water laps over the top of my shoes and seeps into my socks. The vomit coloured mud attacks the hem of my suit trousers. The ice cold wind seeks out even the slightest bit of exposed flesh. Fuck.
But at least I'm not alone. There are three snappers and a cameraman with me. We're all in the shit together.
And shit there was. Along with a used nappy, empty beer cans, only God knows what household waste - even a Christmas tree that looks as if someone tried to bury it at sea. Behind me to my right, is a burned out motorcycle. To its right, about 100 feet away up a slight rise, lie the remains of a torched car. "Jesus Christ. Is it just me or this place a fucking hole?" one of the photographers asks as he tries to keep himself warm and dry - and get a decent shot at the same time. For anyone who thinks crime reporting is glamorous, this photograph should set them straight pretty quickly...

(© The Irish Daily Star)

It was taken by my colleague Jean Curran last Tuesday morning near the scene of the gun homicide of Stephen O'Halloran in Tallaght late the previous night. He was sitting with two friends in his 97D Renault Megane, parked outside his mother's house on Kilmartin Drive.
It was just before midnight when they came for him. Two men walked up to the car, pulled out a Glock each, and started firing.
O'Halloran was hit several times - the fatal one going in through the neck and ricocheting around his chest. The two young men with him were both hit, but they survived. It barely made the headlines for a day: fewer than 24 hours later another criminal, Graham McNally, was shot six times in the face and dumped on the Ashbourne Road. He was mentioned, without being named, in my previous blog last week: he's a sidekick of The Gangster. He was with him when other criminals tried to kill them. He survived that, but a week later was killed.
We got to Tallaght at around 10am, 10 hours after O'Halloran was shot. The Garda cordon around the murder scene was already well established. White and blue tape, pushed to the limit by the wind, still did its job and stopped us getting anywhere near the spot where the shooting happened. The best shot we could get was on the opposite side of the green. But it was about 300 yards away, and even then we didn't have a straight line of vision: the shooting happened at the end of the cul de sac. We could see nothing. Zilch. Diddly squat.
But there's always a plan B. And that's where the photographers come in.
Snappers really do get the short end of the stick. We indolent hacks can stand around, talk crap to each other, try to speak to a few neighbours, then wander back to our cars and turn the heat on to thaw out. But they can't leave the scene. They are the first media to arrive and the last to leave - long after we've got our angle and disappeared. They have to stay to get the State Pathologist going in and the body coming out.
If the shit really hits the fan, we can subtly put our notebooks in our pockets, pretend not to be there and melt into the background. But with a 300mm lens stuck on the end of his camera, there is nowhere for a picture artist to hide. Not that they would. I'm constantly amazed by their resolve, even in the most dangerous situations. Nothing matters but that which they see in the viewfinder of their camera. The poor fuckers don't even get bylines.
But they are, in essence, shit magnets.
Wherever they go, trouble is usually waiting. Outraged family members, angry friends, weirdo busybodies. They all see a snapper about the place and lose the head. And many of these punters seem to have strange sexual habits as well, judging by the number of times I've seen someone tell a photographer that he would really like to stick that camera up his arse. Whatever turns you on, I suppose.
I'm constantly amazed by the number of reporters who leave their snapper colleagues to their own devices. There are countless stories of reporters simply abandoning their photographer colleagues, friends even, when trouble erupts. I try to stick with the snapper as much as possible. When they're in trouble they need somebody with them, even if it's only for moral support. At gangland funerals, for example, I'll stand right beside the photographer just in case - most other hacks would choose to sit in their car, anonymous and safe. Not that I'd be any good in a fight, but at least they might think twice if there are two of us.
That's why I ended up in that sodden field behind the murder scene in Tallaght on Tuesday morning. We're all in this together. If they have to walk through the mud, so do we. One of the snappers realised that there was a field behind the murder scene that might give a better chance of a picture. So we all slogged together through the watery field until we came to a 10 foot high wall, behind which was the murder street. Luckily, someone had decided a ladder was surplus to requirements and abandoned it in the field. The snappers used it to climb up to the top of the wall and snap the gardai and murder scene around 100 yards away. I stood there getting very wet and very depressed.
In the end, we got some good photographs and the trek through the shit was worth it. The wet feet and dirty shoes are forgotten about in a couple of hours. What really lingers, however, is the murder of Stephen O'Halloran and what it says about Gangland Ireland today. You don't have to be a mobster to be targeted by the Glock-lovers. All you have to do is cross the wrong people.
He wasn't a big fish - he probably wasn't even a drug dealer. He was a thug. What the gardai call a gouger. Nothing more. He broke a woman's jaw; he left a neighbour needing rehab after a row about a dog; he assaulted four people when he burgled their house; he liked throwing his weight around and was quick to use his fists against anyone who crossed him.
But, obviously, he picked on the wrong person, somewhere along the line.
That person served up his revenge on a cold Monday night.

The Gangster got lucky last week...

2009-01-19T15:39:00.007Z

He hates them. When he sees them in the street, he smirks and mocks them. When they bring him in for questioning, he takes a leaf out of the Provos' book and simply stares at the wall – refusing even to acknowledge their existence.
But now he owes gardai his life.
A routine patrol in Dublin last week intercepted suspects who detectives believe were on their way to murder the man who is quickly becoming Ireland's number one gangster. If the unarmed officers hadn't stopped the two would-be assassins, it's highly likely The Gangster would be dead now. Not that he'll thank them, of course. To him, the gardai are more his enemy than the gougers who are now intent on killing him. And anyway, he has his own, extrajudicial, way of dealing with people who try to rub him out.
In my last blog, I speculated that it would only be a matter of time before criminals turned their attention on The Gangster: I didn't think it would happen so quickly, however. I thought he maybe had six or seven months, a year even, before they caught up with him. But gangland moves quickly. He got lucky last week thanks to some good old fashioned police work by the people the State employs to counter him and his ilk: uniformed and unarmed gardai spot a car acting suspiciously and close in.

The only shock about the murder attempt was the people behind it. I thought that allies of Michael Roly Cronin, whose death – along with his sidekick James Maloney – he ordered on January 7 would have gone for revenge. Cronin was a dangerous drug dealer with plenty of allies – surely, I thought, they would target The Gangster. But it wasn't Cronin’s gang. The Gangster is suspected of organising several murders in the last three years and it was friends of one of them who are believed to have sanctioned this hit.

But, thanks to the gardai, they didn't get a chance to take their target out. The irony is that the man the gardai saved will probably go on to order more murders, more drug importations, more mayhem. Doubtless someone else will try to kill him soon. It reminds me of the chilling boast by the IRA when they almost killed British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at Brighton in 1984. “Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.” The gangster can’t, won’t, rely on gardai to save his life again. They’ll go for him again - he’ll have to be lucky again. Or else he’ll have to get them before they get him.
Many people will probably be cursing the gardai who prevented last week’s hit. One of them is bound to be the man who The Gangster paid a few grand to kill Cronin and Maloney. His life is now under direct threat from The Gangster. He is a low level criminal from north inner city Dublin. Gardai are amazed that The Gangster even thought of using him as the hitman. He is a chronic drug addict who carries out armed robberies to feed his habit: detectives never had him marked down as a killer. A violent thug, yes, a hitman, no.

And the fact that he left so many vital clues shows that The Gangster was stupid in his choice of killer. He dropped the murder weapon, a Magnum .357 revolver, close to the scene; he abandoned gloves and a coat nearby; he left his DNA in the car in which he shot Maloney and Cronin; he is likely to have been caught on CCTV sitting in the car before the murder. In other words, he has given gardai a huge amount of clues and it’s likely they’ll soon be able to charge him with he murders. If he is tracked down by gardai, the possibility is that he could turn tout and give evidence against the gangster. There is a precedent for this in the shape of James Martin Cahill, who killed Limerick doorman Brian Fitzgerald for one of the gangs there. That would be a huge result for the gardai and a nightmare for The Gangster.
And it leaves him in a sticky situation. He can either hope the killer, who is believed to have fled to Spain, stays hidden and isn’t arrested. Or he can take his own, decisive, action to make sure there’s no danger that the killer ever, ever, talks.

The killer really only has two options: turn himself in to the cops, serve his time and save his own life. Or he can rely on his own wits and try to survive alone in a foreign country – with cops and The Gangster breathing down his neck.

"This guy clearly takes no prisoners. Get in his way and you’ll soon be suffering from an extreme case of lead poisoning."

2009-01-12T13:02:00.008Z

Seven days.

It took just seven days for the guns to come out again. And when they did, they came out with a vengeance. 2009 was only a week old when gangland Ireland claimed its first two victims of the year, Michael Cronin and James Maloney. They obviously won’t be the last. Last year, 20 people were victims of gun killing in Ireland. That was the second highest toll in the history of the state, behind 2006 when the number of gun homicides reached 26. The figure of 20 is quite high, when you compare it with England and Wales, where 42 people died in gun homicides last year. That’s with a population of some 53.4 million – more than 10 times ours. I wonder how many there’ll be this year in Ireland? I think we’re going to have a bad year and I would fear that 2009 will be just as deadly, if not worse, than 2006. The credit crunch even affects gangsters – fewer people buying cocaine because they’ve lost their jobs will mean gangs fighting over a shrinking market. Add that to the slashing of the overall Garda overtime budget and we have a recipe for bloody mayhem.
Drug dealer Cronin was shot in the head as he sat behind the wheel of his UK registered Volvo in Summerhill, in the centre of Dublin, on Wednesday, January 7. His associate, Maloney, died two days later. He had also been shot in the head. A few miles away, and an hour and half later, JP Brennan was shot in the arm and neck in his girlfriend’s house in Malahide. The bullet that hit him in the neck exited through his face. But he’ll live.
In relation to the double murder, it’s likely there will be quick progress. Gardai have the gun, they have what are probably the killer’s coat and gloves. He was sitting in the back seat before he pulled out a Magnum .357 and blasted his two victims from point blank range – he must have left trace evidence in the vehicle, including DNA. The gardai probably have the killer on CCTV. With all that, they have a good chance of catching the killer. Word is they already have a prime suspect.
But the man who ordered the hit, well, that’s a different matter. Like most godfathers, his hands are clean. He may have ordered up to a half a dozen murders in the last five years – but he has never pulled the trigger. Instead, like all bosses, he gets some lieutenant to carry out the hits while he sits back and watches. There’s no chance of the good guys getting him for the murder. He’s too far removed from the smoking gun.
To look at him, you wouldn’t think that he was one of the most dangerous, most vicious, criminals in the country. He just looks like some, admittedly well built and slightly menacing, fella you would see down the pub, or in the gym. But this is one man you would not want to accidentally bump into while heading to the bar to order a pint.
There were plenty of us reporters there when he was brought into the dock of a Dublin court. He was arrested over a high profile incident and we were there to see him in the flesh and facing justice. I can still remember seeing him for the first time. As ever, I was struck by the normality, the banality, of evil. It would be comforting if he had two heads, or three eyes, or some mark of Cain that betrayed what was going on inside his psychotic head. But, the reality is, he just looked like the rest of us humans – on the surface, anyway.
He showed no fear. He had just been charged with an offence that could see him doing over a decade behind bars. But if he cared, he didn’t show it. He was calmness personified as he appeared in front of the judge. Bail was refused because of the seriousness of the crime he was alleged to have committed. But that was only temporary: he was given bail a few weeks later. He came back on the streets and started back to what he knew best: murder and mayhem. The murders of Maloney and Cronin weren’t the first he orchestrated since a judge let him out – they probably won’t be the last.
I’d been following his ‘career’ with interest since early 2007. That was when he started to emerge as the successor to Martin `Marlo’ Hyland, shot dead in Finglas with innocent plumber Anthony Campbell in November 2006. Marlo controlled much of the drugs trade in north and west Dublin – and the man I was staring at in a Dublin court had started making shapes to take over that lucrative market. Not only was he interested in the business, he was also eager to snap up another valuable chunk of the Marlo empire. Hyland had the smuggling networks. Not only did he know where to sell the cocaine when it got in into Ireland, but he also knew how to get it in here in the first place. He had a network of established smuggling routes that brought in millions of euro worth of drugs into Ireland every month, for him and others to sell.
With Hyland out of the way, the new man on the block was ready to step up. And boy did he do that. John Daly was one of the few people in Finglas who would stand up to him. Daly, who shot to fame when he rang RTE’s Liveline from his cell inside Ireland’s supposed top security Portlaoise jail in May 2007, got out prison in August that year. He too saw the vacuum created by the death of Hyland, to whom he was close, and started making plans to take over his pal’s empire. He may as well have signed his own death warrant. Within three months, Daly was dead, killed as he sat in a taxi in Finglas. The main suspect is Marlo’s successor – the man who’ll do anything to protect his patch. He’s also suspected of ordering the murder in Finglas in August last year of armed robber Paul `Farmer’ Martin – shot dead as he sat in a pub following a friend’s funeral.
Gardai also reckon he was behind the murders of Cronin and Maloney.This guy clearly takes no prisoners. Get in his way and you’ll soon be suffering from an extreme case of lead poisoning. I suspect he knows he’s facing a good stretch of time behind bars and is getting rid of anyone who he perceives as a threat to his business before he gets locked up. That’s probably why he got Cronin killed last week – he was living in Finglas and, like all of the wannabe gangsters, thought he was somebody. We can’t name him at the moment. If he’s convicted of the charge he is facing, we’ll be able to name him for that – but it’s highly unlikely we’ll be able to unmask him as the serial killer he is. That’s libel for you. The only way we will be able to reveal his name is if he ends up dead himself, which is not as unlikely as he thinks. In recent weeks, he has been boasting that he is confident the charges against him are going to be dropped. I personally would not be too sure. Anyway, 10 years behind bars might just be the best thing that could happen to him. Sooner or later, somebody stronger, more deadly, more vicious and less human will come along and do what he did to Cronin, Maloney, Martin and Daly. Nobody is invincible. Gangland is in a constant state of flux. One day your friend is your enemy, the next day your enemy is still your enemy and he's standing over you with a Glock. There are no friendships, there is no loyalty. Every now and again, a new Mr Big emerges in gangland. Someone who sticks his head above the parapet and reckons he’s the main man; someone who believes the hype about himself and thinks he’s untouchable, that the cops won’t get him and no criminal would dare. He’s invariably wrong on both counts. Cahill, Gilligan, Hyland, PJ Judge, the list is endless of people who either fought the law and the law won – or were killed by their pals. It just might be better for this new Mr Big if the good guys get him – before the bad guys do.

“Leave the area now, or I will arrest you.”

2009-01-04T14:45:00.008Z

You know there’s a problem even before he opens his mouth. He strides up to us, his eyes blazing with contempt, antipathy, anger and probably and little bit of fear.
He stops a few feet away from us and gives us both barrels.
“Right, no photographs. You’re not to take any photographs. Is that clear?”
“But we’re just trying to do our job. And I don’t mean to be rude, but this is a public place – we can take photos where we want.”
“No, you listen, I’m telling you that you are not to take any photographs. In fact, move away now – get way back.”
“But, hold on, there’s no tape up, the scene’s over there. Sure look, all these people are standing here looking and you’re not telling them to move.”
“I am directing you to leave this area. If you do not move away now, I will arrest you.”
“No problem, garda.” Through gritted teeth.
Another day, another row.
The sad thing is he can do what he wants to us. Under the public order act, any garda can tell anyone to leave an area. If they don’t, the garda can arrest them. It doesn’t apply just to drunks: it also applies to reporters just trying to do their job and is being used increasingly by gardai on the ground against the media. Paranoid souls that we are, we all think they are out to get us – and they probably are. The big question is why?
Recently, I was at the scene of a murder in a large town. A man had been killed and the immediate area, beside a busy road, had been sealed off. We vultures were gathered across the road, about 100 yards away. Suddenly, a young garda came up to the photographers and camera men and told them to move back another 100 or so yards – thus ruining the possibility of getting a good shot of the coffin being taken out of the murder scene. (Yeah, I know, we’re scum. The truth is we’d rather not be spending four hours freezing our nuts off waiting for the hearse to come along to get the pic – but it is an integral part of any murder/tragic death story.) The lads protested. They pointed out that people were walking on the road, on which we were standing, past the sealed off murder scene – surely it didn’t make sense to allow them so close and keep us away?
No joy. They had to move back. A senior officer had ordered it, apparently. I hid my notebook in my pocket and stayed my ground while the snappers had to, grudgingly, retreat. But the day will come, undoubtedly, when they refuse to move back. And that’s when the fun will begin. It will be up to a judge to decide of the public order act does actually allow gardai to arrest a photographer for not moving on from somewhere where they are legitimately working.

My theory is that official Ireland is becoming increasingly anti media and increasingly more secretive.

The gardai we deal with on a day to day basis are just victims of the new state secrecy. Reporters of all types are finding it harder and harder to get information as public and civil servants clam up.

It's not the mules' fault...

Nowhere is that more apparent than An Garda Siochana.
I don’t blame the mules on the ground for the increase in hostility, or perhaps more accurately the decrease in civility, at scenes. Most gardai are fundamentally decent, hard working and polite. Obviously, because I’m a crime reporter, I would be close to a lot of gardai – and there are some I’m proud to consider friends. They have a hard enough job without some muppet reporter coming up to them at a scene and acting the fool. Up until few years ago, relationships between gardai on the ground and reporters were, largely, cordial. They have a job to do; we have a job to do. We respect their crime scenes, we don’t act the bollox; we don’t ask uniformed lads just preserving a `Garda do not cross’ line any stupid questions – they leave us at it. All we want, anyway, is just a few pics. That live and let live philosophy is gradually dying. Some gardai become pushy and rude – some snappers threaten to report them to the Garda Ombudsman. It’s pretty nasty sometimes.
Of course, it’s not a one way street. Do reporters or snappers sometimes cross the line? Yes. Is it a regular occurrence? No. The same people go to most murder scenes – they know what to do and what not to do. Occasionally someone new who doesn’t know the score comes along and does something stupid – but they soon learn. Speak to any reporter or photographer who goes to scenes and he or she will tell you that the attitude of many gardai they encounter there is changing, hardening.
But, as I said, I don’t blame them. I blame the culture in which they are working. The message is repeatedly being hammered into them from their bosses: don’t talk to the media. The number of internal investigations carried out every year into leaks is frightening. I’ve been interviewed several times in the past few years, as have most crime reporters, by detectives investigating a leak. It’s a charade, really. They know it’s a waste of time, I know it’s a waste of time, but they still go through with it. They ask you where you got your story, you reply: “I have no comment to make on this, thank you.” Everybody’s happy – they’ve done what their bosses have asked them to do, and I’ve politely declined to help them.
But there is a consequence to every investigation like that. Every garda is now afraid to talk to a reporter in case they are disciplined. Then Justice Minister Michael McDowell (left) brought in the Garda Siochana Act in 2005 that warned gardai they could be jailed and slapped with huge fines (up to E75,000) if they spoke to a reporter and disclosed secret information to them.
Now, the caveat is that the Act specifies that the disclosure of the information must have a “harmful effect” before the leaking becomes a crime. It lists 10 areas that would be defined as harmful – everything from facilitating the commission of an offence, to identifying a witness in an investigation to damaging state security. So, it could be argued that briefing a reporter about some aspect of an investigation that isn’t harmful is not illegal. Remember, most reporters are just looking for a bit of extra information that cannot be given officially – they’re not trying to wreck any probe, or cause the collapse of the state. But the reality is all gardai know about the generality of the act now and are terrified of it. More and more, reporters are getting the response “Do you want to get me jailed?” when you try to speak to a garda off the record.
This probably sounds like a self pitying rant by a frustrated hack – and it is. But there are bigger issues here. One of the biggest strengths of An Garda Siochana has always been the link it has with the people. The media have a role in maintaining that link. Gardai tell us and we tell the people. Sometimes, we can tell the people things that gardai can’t officially say. Gardai might not want to say something officially about an investigation – but want the message to get out to the people. That’s where we come in.

If only Ireland was America...

But gardai are doing that less and less. The culture of fear within An Garda Siochana is getting stronger by the day. And it’s their link with the people that will suffer in the long run.
It doesn’t have to be like this, however.
A few years ago, I was investigating disgraced judge Brian Curtin. Several days after the State in May 2004 dropped the charge of possessing child pornography against him – thanks to gardai searching his house on what the trial judge ruled was an out of date warrant – I decided to see if I could get more information on the images he allegedly possessed. He was charged under Operation Amethyst, which took place on May 27, 2002 and was the first large scale Garda investigation into child pornography in this country.
The information that led to around 100 homes and businesses being raided simultaneously came from the US authorities. They busted a child abuse image operation, called Landslide, that had tens of thousands of subscribers all over the world.
The US cop who headed the investigation was, the now retired, Steve Nelson. There was, obviously, no chance of getting anything juicy from the gardai – they were in the middle of a firestorm over the warrant and were keeping their heads down. So I decided to chance my arm and ring the US cop.
Not that it was much of a risk: US cops – and to a lesser extent their UK colleagues, are much more open with the media than the Garda. I knew that if I got him on the phone, there was a good chance he’d talk.
I did get him. But I was totally amazed by his reaction to me, a complete stranger, phoning from thousands of miles away. “What do you need?” he asked. “Everything,” I joked– yet expecting nothing.
There was a long pause on the phone as he went through his database - by long pause, I mean 30 minutes. Eventually, he piped up: “Yes, here he is,” and started to give me, literally, everything.
He gave me Curtin’s credit card number – even the expiry date – and said exactly how much it paid ($29.95) for a month’s subscription to a website called lolitaworld.com (don't worry, the link doesn't exist any more).
He even agreed that, if necessary, he would swear an affidavit on what he had just told me and would fly to Ireland from Dallas to give evidence for us if Curtin sued.
We ran the whole thing on page one the next day: Curtin didn’t sue.
And, almost five years later, I’m still amazed at the openness of this guy – and depressed by the secrecy of our Garda force.
But I’m heartened by the members who are brave enough to talk to us.

Addition at 2pm on Monday, January 5: A reader has emailed me to argue that the media need to bear more responsibility for the increased hostility of gardai, and other state bodies, to us. His argument was that with the increased media competition in this country, some outlets have started writing flyers, particularly in crime. “Now if I was a senior cop, I would be pulling my hair out, over than kind of shite,” he says.
He has a point. Of course we are obsessed with ourselves and always try to blame others when things go wrong, but it is fair to say there is a large number of reporters working in Dublin who do make stuff up – or fail to check up a line before printing it. We’ve all made mistakes, me more than most, but there is an increased tendency for people – obviously under severe pressure from their bosses – to write crap. Gardai obviously react to that.
We are obviously not blameless. But I don't think that accounts for the hostility of gardai on the ground - I think that is an institutional problem.

“Yes, it was the husband...”

2008-12-18T00:27:00.003Z

“So was it the husband? Did he kill her?”
“Ah yeah. Well, I mean, that’s who the gardai are looking at, the hubby. I don’t think there’s anyone else, really. They don’t for an instant think it was a burglary.”
“I knew it. I fucking knew it. I knew he did it. The bastard. How did he think he could get away with it?”
“Well, he obviously thought he had planned the perfect murder. But it stands to reason he’d be the prime suspect. C’mon, when’s the last time you heard of a burglar beating someone to death? It doesn’t happen. A burglar who is disturbed is gonna do a runner out the back door – not beat someone to death. Look, when a woman’s killed in her own home, the first person the cops are going to look at is the husband – they’d be mad not to...”
“Yeah! Jesus, he’s some bollox. Imagine playing the grieving husband routine like that. I tell you, the second I saw him on TV, I turned round and said ` He did it. He’s guilty’. It was so obvious.”
“Yeah. Anyway, he’s goosed...”
“Really? Have they got enough to get him? I bet he thought he’d get away with it...”
“Well, they’re hopeful.”

In late 2004 and early 2005, I was having this conversation a lot. By a lot, I mean 10 or 11 times a day. Most crime reporters were having the same Groundhog Day experience. Your colleagues were asking you, your family was asking you – even some gardai were asking you. Everyone, it seemed, was obsessed with the case of a young woman beaten to death in her own home in rural north Dublin.
The woman was Rachel O’Reilly – her husband, in hindsight a cold, calculating, vicious sociopath, was Joe.

I was convinced Joe O’Reilly did it from day one. I was around 20 feet away from him a few hours after the murder. I saw the look on his face, which was definitely not of someone whose wife had been stolen from him in a horrendous attack. It was of someone who was relaxed, calm and carefree. The look on his face haunts me to this day. I knew there and then he killed her. But, luckily for me, I’m not a cop, so I didn’t have to actually prove anything.
But only a few other people saw him that day - I actually blame The Late, Late Show for the massive public interest – actually, obsession – that endures today about Joseph Anthony O’Reilly, husband, adulterer, father and killer.
Two weeks after he battered his wife Rachel to death at their home in north Dublin, O’Reilly went on RTE’s flagship chatshow to appeal for the public’s help in finding her killer. His performance on the show – and the image of Rachel’s mother Rose Callaly sitting impassively beside him – did two things. Firstly, seemingly everyone who watched it knew there and then Joe O’Reilly was a killer. You could imagine countless viewers turning to their loved one and saying ` That fella’s as guilty as sin.”
And, secondly, it transformed what had been up to then a murder probe like any other into one of the most high profile – and high pressure – investigations ever carried out by the Garda. It was clear he was lying. It was clear Mrs Callaly was extremely uncomfortable being near him. And it was clear O’Reilly was now suspect number one. He obviously thought going on the show would help deflect any suspicion from him, a grieving husband. But it was nothing short of a disaster for him. He was a really bad liar and came across as shifty, evasive and guilty.
He was hanging himself.
The murder of Rachel O’Reilly, beaten to death by the man who promised to love honour and cherish her a few years earlier, really did grip the nation. And it was, for me, his disastrous appearance on Pat Kenny’s TV show that catapulted his murder into the fascinated consciousness of almost every person in Ireland. It led to the case being on the front pages on a weekly basis – and it led to reporters like me having Joe on our mind on a daily basis.
I got the call that a woman’s body had been found at around 2pm on October 4 – two hours after the alarm was raised. We heard she had been found in her house, and were told it could be suspicious. In cases like this, where information is so limited, you automatically think that it isn’t a murder. There are numerous deaths in Ireland every month, where gardai initially are suspicious, but foul play is quickly ruled out. Suspicious quickly becomes suicide, a fall, or a heart attack. It feels silly now, with the murder trial behind us, including details of how Rose found her daughter’s horrifically battered body in her bedroom, to think that we reporters even contemplated anything but murder – it was clear as day to the family, gardai and paramedics at the scene that she had died a violent death. Just goes to show, I suppose, how little we reporters really know.
Anyway, we hot footed it to the Naul in north County Dublin after we got the nod that this was indeed a murder. As we drove the winding road from the M1, little did we know that we were heading into a story that would captivate us and the public for the best part of the next four years. Once we learned the basic facts (a young mum beaten to death in her own home), we immediately started speculating that it was her husband. As we spoke to neighbours outside the cordon, we were trying to build up a picture of her – and her husband. She was nice and chatty, people said. He seemed like a grand fella – he’s very big. Really? Yes, he’s about 6ft 4inches and is some martial arts expert. What’s her name? Rachel. Rachel O’Reilly. And him? Joe.
We were so interested in him because, like gardai, we knew that when a woman is killed in her own home, the first person looked at is the hubby. Of course, stranger murders of women in their own homes do happen – but they are few and far between. Women’s Aid, for example, has compiled frightening figures on female homicides in Ireland. They show most women are murdered by someone they knew, and almost half of the solved cases involved a partner, husband, or ex. So, naturally, the more cynical among us were looking at this husband.
Cynically, and somewhat to my own shame, I bet an RTE cameraman on the scene that it was the husband. I said it was. He said not a chance. I bet him €20 that it was – with the loser making a donation of that amount to Vincent De Paul – I haven’t seen him since, strangely. There were a couple of senior gardai at the police cordon, chatting to reporters, telling us nothing. I said to one `could it have been the husband?’ `We’re looking at him,’ came the firm reply. But he was non committal. He’d say nothing more. How could he? Cops have to actually investigate crimes and bring enough evidence to persuade a judge or jury that they have the right suspect. Reporters, muppets that we are, want to know who the killer is within a few hours of the last blow being delivered. We’re fools sometimes.
Later that dark autumn evening, I was driving around Dunleer. It was around 8pm and we had found out that Joe O’Reilly – to us at this stage a grieving husband, was at his mother Ann’s house in the Meath town. I turned into her street and looked for the number of her house. It was just a normal housing estate, cars lining the cul de sac, lights on in the houses, the flicker of the TV screens jumping around as shadows outside as I drove past.
And then I saw him.
The O’Reilly house was on my right. As I drove slowly past the house (I always make sure the car is turned out of culs de sacs before doing a deathknock, just in case I need to make a fast retreat) I saw a giant standing in the doorway. He was huge. He filled most of the doorway. He was wearing a red fleece top and black tracksuit bottoms. He was looking out onto the street where I was, around 20 feet away. He could have been putting the milk out. He was so calm, and composed I actually didn’t think it was Joe O’Reilly. He looked as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He looked completely at ease with himself. I didn’t know what he looked like at this stage, so I thought it must have been a brother or a friend. I continued on a few yards, did a U-turn and drove back to the house. I got out and walked up to the door, somewhat nervous. I knocked, but nobody answered. The man standing at the door a few seconds earlier was nowhere to be seen.
It was only a few days later, when I saw a newspaper interview he did, that I realised I’d seen Joe O’Reilly on the day of the murder. Christ almighty, it was him. The look on his face, his demeanour, the lack of any despair or grief chilled me to the bone. I was convinced from then he was the killer.
Everyone else was convinced two weeks later when he went on the Late, Late.
A few hours before O’Reilly went on RTE television and turned himself into Ireland’s most hated, I was preparing myself to make a phone call. We had been following the case and we knew that gardai were becoming increasingly suspicious of him. Now, we decided, was the time to ask O’Reilly the hard question. He had done several interviews, posing as the devastated widower. But it was clear there was something not right about him. He seemed too eager to please the reporters; too happy to talk about the injuries Rachel had suffered; too happy to take a call. I’ve spoken to plenty of people who have lost a loved one to murder. Some talk, some don’t, but those who do are genuinely upset. Even if they try to remain strong for a stranger, you can see the despair in their eyes. O’Reilly, however, looked fine.
So, we decided, let’s ask him a few hard questions. We were hoping he’d admit to us he was a suspect. If he admitted that, we’d have a great story. But we needed him to confirm he was a suspect. If we said it off our own bat, he’d be seeing us in court. We needed him to say it – and I was faced with the task of coaxing it out of him. I prepared myself, steeled myself, for the call. I decided the only thing I could do was ask him straight out – look, a lot of people are looking at you in relation to the murder of your wife? Would you like to talk about this? The hope is he would out himself as a suspect. Still, even though it was over the phone, I was extremely nervous about asking a recent widower that question.
Thankfully, the decision was taken, way above my pay scale, that we would leave it to our sister paper, Star Sunday, to go after that line. So the next day, my colleague John Mooney had to make that call. I listened to the tape a few times. John’s been at crime reporting longer than me, but you can hear the nervousness in his voice as he prepares to broach the subject.
In the end, he need not have worried. O’Reilly volunteered he was a suspect. “'I have nothing to hide and I think the gardai know that. I didn't kill her. Everyone, including myself, is a suspect until this is resolved. I was questioned the same way everyone else was and statistically you know it's usually the husband, boyfriend, whatever." Bingo.
But, between me preparing to make the call and John actually making the call, O’Reilly went on the Late, Late.
And that changed everything.
Now, he is appealling the conviction. He'll be in the Court of Criminal Appeal on Thursday morning to try to get his conviction quashed.
The main point of appeal is that damning mobile phone evidence, that placed him close to the murder scene when he said he was 15 miles away, should not have been presented to the jury.
I don't think he has a chance of winning.

...And how gardai got their man

2008-12-17T18:52:00.004Z

WITHIN MINUTES of Rose Callaly finding her beloved daughter Rachel lying dead in her own house, one of the biggest Garda investigations ever undertaken began.
Officers spent tens of thousands of hours trying to get enough evidence to have Joe O'Reilly charged with Rachel's murder.
But it would be almost three years before they had the satisfaction of seeing him jailed for life.
At one stage more than 70 gardai of all ranks were involved in the probe that lasted almost two years before the investigation was complete and a file was sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions.
Officers have revealed that they:
· Held case conferences every single day for weeks after the murder
· Interviewed more than 4,000 people
· Took more than 500 witness statements
· Carried out house to house inquiries within a 10 mile radius of the murder house and
· Visited every single house and business on the 15 mile journey between the O'Reilly home and Phibsboro bus station in central Dublin, where Joe drove after the murder.

But at the end of the day, it all came down to one man and his phone: Joseph Anthony O'Reilly and the mobile he had with him when he battered his wife to death.
If he had left the mobile at work that day as he went to kill his wife, he'd probably be a free man today.
Rachel's battered body was found by her distraught mother Rose at the family home just after 2pm on Monday, October 4, 2004.
Chief Superintendent Mick Finnegan, who was in charge of the Louth Meath Garda division which covers the Naul, visited the scene around 40 minutes after Rachel's body was found.
Dozens of gardai flooded into the area as a murder investigation began.
As well as officers from Balbriggan, the nearest big station, detectives from the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation – based at Harcourt Square in central Dublin – also drove to the scene.
They are the force's elite detectives and members of that unit are sent to every single murder in the state.
The unit was headed by detective Chief Superintendent Martin Donnellan at the time – one of the force's most experienced detectives. He was subsequently promoted to Assistant Commissioner and is now retired.
Another key member of the NBCI sent to the scene was Detective Superintendent Dominic Hayes. As well as playing a key role in the O'Reilly inquiry, D/Supt Hayes also led Operation Steel, the Garda crackdown on drugs boss Marlo Hyland.
The area around the house was sealed off as forensic experts, covered in white protective clothing from head to foot, combed every inch of the property looking for even the faintest piece of evidence that would help them snare the killer.
Parts of the house had seemingly been ransacked, with clothes and other items on the floor of the kitchen – it looked like the house had been ransacked.
Gardai initially suspected that Rachel had been murdered as she disturbed a burglar. Surely, in the struggle, the killer would have left some DNA in the form of blood or even hair, at the scene?
After a few days, they'd be disappointed, however.
The murder weapon could not be found. Officers searched the entire area, but simply couldn't trace it. State pathologist Professor Marie Cassidy could only tell gardai it had been a blunt instrument.
Finding the weapon – which has still not been traced to this day – would have been a huge advance in the inquiry.
And there was worse to come.
There was no DNA evidence. But, as the investigation proceeded, detectives would later see the full significance of that.
Within hours of Rachel's murder, gardai were looking hard at Joe.
Statistics meant they simply had to examine the possibility Rachel had been murdered by her husband.
The vast majority of women who are killed in their own home – as many as eight out of 10 - are murdered by their husband, partner or boyfriend.
And gardai knew it was extremely rare for a woman to be killed in her home by a stranger, so it was logical they would want to know O'Reilly's movements on the day of the murder.
At this stage he was not a suspect, but gardai knew they had to eliminate him before they could go after anyone else.
And that was the first problem the gardai faced: O'Reilly had a strong alibi.
And by 7pm, O'Reilly was at his mother Ann's home in Dunleer, Co Louth – around 20 miles away. He was playing the devastated husband role to perfection.
Detective Superintendent Michael Hoare, Balbriggan crime sergeant Pat Marry and Garda (now Sergeant) Aaron Gormley sat down in the living room of the O'Reilly home to interview Joe.
Calmly, deliberately, O'Reilly told his first lies.
Apart from lying three times about having an affair with Nikki Pelley, O'Reilly also gave officers a false picture of where he was on the morning Rachel was murdered.
He told them he was at the Broadstone and Phibsboro bus garage in north inner city Dublin between 9am and 11.30am on the day.
And he said he was there with Derek Quearney, a 46-year-old former soldier who was his deputy at the Viacom advertising agency where they both worked.
The interview finished at 8pm. By 9pm, other officers had contacted Quearney. He backed up large parts of O'Reilly's story.
He told detectives he saw O'Reilly at around 10am in the depot, then again at 10.30am. He told the officers he left with O'Reilly to go back to Viacom at 11.00am. They got back to Viacom, in the Bluebell Industrial estate in the west of the city, at around midday. O'Reilly was in the office until after 1pm when he got a call to say Rachel hadn't picked up her two kids - which is when he headed to the Naul himself.
It was a rock solid alibi.
O'Reilly simply couldn't have done it, based on Quearney's alibi.
So, if it wasn't the husband, whodunit?
Gardai quickly focused on the possibility that it was indeed a burglary gone wrong.
The day after the murder the Louth Meath Garda search team was deployed to the area around the house in Baldarragh.
Some 500 metres from the house, on the road leading away from the property towards the Naul itself, sergeant Oliver Keegan came across something interesting.
He found a rucksack, camera bag and jewellery box from the family home dumped in a flooded culvert 500 metres from the house. The three items had been taken from the house.
The camera bag even had Rachel's name on it.
Was this the breakthrough? Perhaps the burglar had dumped the items in his panic after he killed Rachel.
Attention focused on a number of different criminals who were known to be active in the area.
In particular there was one gang from Ballymun in north Dublin, only 20 odd minutes from Rachel and Joe's house. Perhaps they were responsible for Rachel's murder?
But then disaster.
The house was forensically clean. All the fingerprints in the house could be attributed to either Joe, Rachel or Rose Callaly.
Nobody else's prints had been left behind. The only person whose blood - apart from Rachel's – was found at the scene was Thomas Lowe, the victim's natural brother.
In August of that year, he had been putting decking down for Rachel and Joe and had cut his hand. He went to the utility room to get a plaster and his blood dripped on the floor and washing machine. He went to clean it up, but Rachel told him she would do it.
However, she left a small smear of his blood on the washing machine. But gardai quickly ruled Mr Lowe out of the investigation.
Nor was there any forensic yield from the evidence found in the culvert.
But an absence of forensic evidence can quickly become a positive.
How, gardai, wondered, could such a violent incident take place and the killer's prints or DNA weren't at the scene?
What if the killers prints were there? What if O'Reilly was the killer? There was a perfect explanation for his prints being there, he lived there after all.
Gardai knew that if no-one else's DNA was found at the scene then there was a good chance O'Reilly was the killer.
"It stands to reason," one officer said.
"Nobody else's DNA or trace evidence was found at the scene. That sounds bad but, if you think about, the absence of someone else's prints points strongly to it being one of the people whose prints we lifted from the scene – Joe."
On October 8, just four days after the murder, Detective Chief Superintendent Martin Callinan got involved in the investigation.
He was head of Garda Crime and Security, the intelligence arm of the force.
It's normally tasked with tracking down terrorists and its operatives played a key role in destroying the Real IRA's campaign in the late 19990s.
But it is also the department of the Garda that handles telephone evidence.
Only the head of Crime and Security can request mobile phone companies to hand over mobile phone records of people of interest.
On that day, the now deputy garda commissioner formally asked for the records of O'Reilly, his lover Nikki Pelley and his alibi Derek Quearney.
It was around three weeks before gardai would get the results.
In the meantime, normal policing work continued.
Dozens of officers were involved in the probe every day, based in the incident room at Balbriggan Garda station – the very heart of the investigation.
As well as carrying out detailed searches of the area around the house and a forensic trawl inside the property, gardai also targeted the wider district around the hall.
Officers carried out door to door inquiries in the area, looking for witnesses.
The area of those inquiries gradually grew and grew until, several months after the murder, they had canvassed every house and property within a 10 mile radius of the O'Reilly home.
It was good, old fashioned police legwork, but it yielded few rewards.
Nobody had seen anything. No suspects were sighted. There was nothing out of the ordinary.
But then there was a breakthrough.
Just 500 metres from the O'Reilly home is the entrance to Murphy's Quarry. It is a huge, sprawling site, borne out by the fact that a mobile phone mast on the quarry was actually 850 metres from Joe and Rachel's house.
Like many businesses, the Murphy Quarry had a CCTV system installed. There were four cameras in the complex, with one of them pointing at the entrance, partially covering the road that leads to the O'Reilly home.
At the end of October, Gardai requested CCTV footage from the morning Rachel was killed.
When they looked at it, they saw a dark coloured car – to the non expert it was of poor quality – heading towards the O'Reilly home at 09.10, at a time Joe said he was in Broadstone. The car went the other way at 09.59.
They also collected images of a similar car heading north and passing by the Europrise building at Blake's Cross in north Dublin, around seven miles from Joe and Rachel's home at 08.55. It was caught on camera coming back towards Dublin at the same site at 10.07.
Gardai couldn't say what the vehicle was, but they knew someone who just might.
They collated all the images and sent them to UK company Kalagate, world renowned experts on analysing CCTV images.
In the meantime, gardai got initial results from the mobile phone companies in relation to the mobiles of O'Reilly, Quearney and Pelley.
The information, handed over at the end of October, was simply dynamite.
It led to Joe O'Reilly becoming the prime suspect for his wife's murder.
The data clearly showed Quearney's contention that he met O'Reilly at close to 10am at Phibsboro was wrong.
The evidence showed that O'Reilly's phone bounced off the mast at Murphy's Quarry – some 850 metres from Joe's house – at 09.25 and 09.52.
Yet O'Reilly, five hours after Rachel's body was found, had told gardai he had been in Phibsboro at that time. And Quearney backed that that up.
They knew O'Reilly was lying and they believed Quearney had made a mistake.
Once the phone evidence came back, events moved quickly.
On November 16, just over a month after the killing, Pelley and Quearney were arrested.
They were taken to Balbriggan Garda station. They weren't suspected of killing Rachel, but were being held on suspicion of withholding information. They were later released without charge.
But the process yielded positive results. Quearney admitted that he could be wrong about what time he saw O'Reilly at Phibsboro.
Armed with that, gardai pounced on the main suspect.
Just after 10.20 am O'Reilly was arrested by detective sergeant Pat Marry at the family home.
He was whisked to Drogheda Garda station where he was held for around 12 hours.
He occasionally refused to answer questions, as was his right. At other times, he kept saying: "I didn't kill Rachel."
But there was one seemingly innocuous question he did answer.
NBCI detective sergeant Sean Grennan asked him if he had his mobile with him all day on the day of the murder.
O'Reilly replied: "Yes. I think so."
It was enough for gardai to link him to the phone. If the phone was in the Naul at the time of the murder – so was he.
There was even better news towards the end of 2005 when Andrew Laws gave his report.
Although he said he could not be certain, he could say that there was either moderate or strong possibilities that the cars on the CCTV at Murphy's Quarry and at Blake's Cross could be O'Reilly's, or at least the same make and model.
The gardai had no murder weapon and no confession, but they were now building up a strong circumstantial case to show O'Reilly's guilt,
The phone evidence placed him in the Naul, the CCTV evidence seemed to back that up.
Coupled with emails he sent to his sister Ann in which O'Reilly spoke of his hatred for Rachel and now he believed the marriage was over, but was worried about his wife keeping their two kids, the gardai believed they had a strong case against him.
That was strengthened even more when experts working for 02 showed conclusively that O'Reilly's phone could not have been anywhere else on the day of the murder.
In June, 2006, Garda superintendent Tom Gallagher sent the massive file to the Director Of Public Prosecutions with the recommendation that, based on circumstantial evidence, O'Reilly be charged with murder.
Four months later on October 19, 2006, the DPP agreed.
He ordered O'Reilly's arrest.
The following day, three years and 16 days since she died, Joe O'Reilly was charged with her murder.
And in June 2007, after a four week trial, a jury agreed with Tom Gallagher and the DPP – its 11 members said, based on the evidence, O'Reilly was guilty.
Mick Finnegan, now retired, couldn't hide his delight as O'Reilly was taken down.
"I was always confident if we could get a charge and get him into court, we could get a conviction,” he said.

Why Joe O'Reilly thought he committed the perfect murder...

2008-12-16T22:43:00.002Z

IT WAS a bright Monday morning and a fun loving, devoted young mum of two little boys was going about her usual business in north County Dublin.
Rachel O'Reilly – just six days away from her 31st birthday – left her home at Baldarragh, close to the Naul, at approximately 09.02 on October 4, 2004.
She came out the gate of her detached bungalow in her silver Renault Scenic people carrier and turned left, driving past Murphy's Quarry one minute later.
Twelve minutes later, at 09.15, she had made the short trip to Hedgestown National School, in nearby Lusk, where she dropped off her three year old son Luke.
After a short conversation with his teacher in which she handed over an insurance form and the premium, she was off again.
This time it was to Tots United Montessori in nearby Richardstown, where she arrived at 09.30. There, she dropped off little Adam, her 18-month-old baby boy, to Helen Reddy, the manager.
And then she was off again. This time she drove back to her home, Lambay View.
By rights, she would have stayed in the house for an hour or so, before heading to the gym and then picking up the kids at around 1pm.
But this was no ordinary day.
As she left Tots United, she had no idea that she had only 30 minutes left to live.
But her husband knew exactly what was going to happen to the woman the vowed to love, honour and obey seven years earlier.
Joseph Anthony O'Reilly, who was 32 at the time, had gotten up at around 5am that day.
Rachel would have been unaware of that, however.
The night before, they had had a blazing row and he told Rachel he was leaving her.
He had spent the night in the spare room, as he often did. It's unlikely he slept, however.
He spent almost an hour on the phone to his latest lover, advertising executive Nikki Pelley.
Pelley, three years older than O'Reilly, would later tell gardai that in that conversation, O'Reilly called his wife a "cunt".
But there was another reason why he probably didn't much sleep that night.
He was busy planning the perfect murder.
While Rachel was still asleep, O'Reilly drove from the Naul to Jackie Skelley's gym at Citywest, west Dublin, arriving there at 06.20.
It was a few minutes' drive, at that time of the morning, from Viacom outdoor advertising company, where he was depot manager, at Bluebell Industrial Estate.
He and his deputy, former soldier Derek Quearney, sat in the sauna for a while, before showering and heading off to work.
By 07.45 they were both back at Viacom, getting ready for their day's work.
They were planning to do an inspection of buses carrying adverts commissioned by Viacom at Phibsboro and Broadstone Bus Depot on the other side of town.
They had planned to travel in convoy but Derek Quearney, who served in the army for 21 years and retired in 1998 with the rank of sergeant, wasn't ready when his boss wanted to move.
O'Reilly wouldn't, couldn't, wait. He went on by himself while Mr Quearney dealt with some staffing issues.
It was just 8am and O'Reilly was on the road.
But he wasn't going to Phibsboro and an inspection of buses was certainly the last thing on his mind.
It's likely he drove from Bluebell, through Chapelizod and onto the M50.
He got to the airport at around 08.45 and came off the M50 onto the M1, heading north.
Ten minutes later he pulled off the M1 at the exit for Skerries, Donabate and Lusk.
He turned on to the old Belfast Road, driving past an Esso garage on his left just before the Skerries turn. On his right, he drove past a company called Europrise, specialising in wholesale plants.
He continued his journey, driving his four year old navy blue Fiat Marea estate at normal speed.
While he was at the steering while getting ready to murder his wife, Rachel was busy at home.
It was around 08.50 and she had already got Adam and Luke dressed and fed for the day. In a few minutes she'd load them into her Scenic and head off.
By 9am she and the kids were ready.
By 9am Joe was also ready.
He was only a few miles away from the house as Rachel drive off at 09.02.
She is seen driving past Murphy's Quarry at 09.03.
Seven minutes later, at 09.10, O'Reilly also drove past the quarry. But, unlike Rachel, he was heading towards the family home.
O'Reilly was playing a dangerous, high stakes game.
His plan was to get in, kill Rachel, get out and get back to Broadstone all within two hours.
It was a tight timeframe. If Rachel was running even a few minutes late, his plan was doomed.
But she was reliable. She was on time.
He got to the house at around 09.11. He had thirty minutes to prepare himself before his wife came back home.
First, he got the house ready. He closed the curtains in the kitchen, something that was never done.
Then he went round the house trying to make it look like a burglar had been inside.
He opened a few drawers, put some clothes on the kitchen table and laid other items on the floor.
Then he grabbed Rachel's jewellery box, with her wedding and engagement rings inside and other items.
He then took a brown rucksack bearing Rachel's name and a camcorder bag from the living room.
He put the camcorder bag and the jewellery box inside the rucksack and got into his car.
He drove out of the house and turned right, stopping at a ditch around 500 metres away.
There he placed the bag and its contents in the water, but made sure they could be easily found, before heading back to the house.
It was around 09.30 now. Rachel would be home soon and he needed to get ready.
He went back into the house and headed towards the main bedroom, the room where he rarely slept with his wife.
First, he made a small detour into another bedroom, the room where he slept the previous night.
He and Rachel both worked out a lot and that's where the weights they used were stored.
He picked up a dumbbell, took off the weights and went to the bedroom.
By now Rachel was only minutes way.
At 09.41 Rachel again drove past Murphy's Quarry, this time heading to the family home.
She got there probably one minute later.
She pulled her Renault Scenic up to the right side of the house and stopped.
She turned off the engine, took the keys out of the ignition, got out of the car and walked the few feet to the back door of the house.
The house had a front door, but it was never used – instead the family preferred the informality of going in through the patio doors that led to the kitchen at the rear.
Only two people know what happened next: Rachel and Joe. One can't say what happened, the other is unlikely to ever want to.
But gardai believe Rachel walked into the kitchen and Joe called out her name as he stood in the centre of the main bedroom.
Surprised to hear her husband's voice – especially as they had a row the night before – Rachel quickly headed towards the bedroom.
The bedroom was at the end of the hallway, at the right, so she would not have seen O'Reilly standing just inside as she walked towards it.
As soon as she turned right, into the bedroom, O'Reilly pounced.
With the dumbbell in his right hand, O'Reilly hit her square on the forehead.
Stunned, she fell to the floor.
O'Reilly didn't give her a chance.
He was on her immediately, repeatedly hitting her around the back of her head.
Rachel tried to defend herself and some of the blows rained down on her arms as she desperately tried to protect her head, his target. But it was all in vain.
Her loving husband Joe was well over 6 foot and built like an American footballer. He easily swatted away her meek protests, driving the dumbbell down again and again around the right side of her skull.
The dumbbell, although small, was heavy and it did irreparable damage to Rachel's skull.
A deep gash quickly appeared just above her right ear. It was so deep, state pathologist Professor Marie Cassidy would later say she could see part of Rachel's skull.
At this stage, Rachel was lying with her back to the floor, defenceless, her arms were outstretched and the top half of her body was unnaturally twisted from the force of the blows.
O'Reilly was by now crouching or kneeling over his dying wife, still pummelling her head with the dumbbell.
Blood had spurted everywhere. It went over him and his clothes, but it didn't stop him. Again and again he used the dumbbell on her.
The blood spurted so violently that drops of it even reached the ceiling, around nine feet up.
It splattered onto the walls of the bedroom. It even went outside the room and droplets of Rachel's lifeblood landed in the hallway, several feet away.
Joe stopped. He thought he had done enough. There was not a sound from Rachel's prone body. The vicious attack had only lasted around a minute.
Gardai would later find evidence that Rachel had been entirely surprised by the onslaught – her car keys were still in her hand when they moved her body. She didn't even get a chance to put them down.
Slowly he got his feet and started the next phase of the perfect murder.
He walked slowly to the main bathroom of the house, where he was planning to get a shower to wash Rachel's blood off him.
But, as he was a few feet away from the shower, he heard a sound and stopped dead still.
It was Rachel. Her throat was gurgling.
He slowly walked back towards her prone body, knelt down beside her and delivered more hammer blows to her head with the dumbbell. When he was satisfied, he got up and went back into the bathroom.
There, he stripped off his bloodstained pink shirt and black trousers, before getting into the shower.
Once he was finished, he towelled himself off before putting his clothes on.
But they were not the ones he wore when he beat Rachel.
Instead, he had already prepared another pink shirt, almost identical to the one he had been wearing moments earlier, and another pair of black trousers.
He washed Rachel's blood off his black boots and put them on again.
He then gathered up his bloodstained clothing and two towels, one brown, one white, that he had used to dry himself.
He walked into the utility room, beside the kitchen where the washing machine was installed.
The machine was already loaded with Adam and Luke's clothing, but he pushed his own blood-sodden clothes inside before putting in washing powder and closing the door.
He then turned it on, waiting to make sure the wash cycle started.
Then he grabbed the towels and the murder weapon and ran to the patio doors – which he left wide open.
He quickly walked outside and got into his Marea estate, before driving out of the driveway.
It was 09.58. It was only 17 minutes since Rachel had walked into the house.
One minute later, at 09.59, he drove past Murphy's Quarry – unknown to him his plan for a perfect murder was already unravelling.
His car was caught on the CCTV system of the quarry driving away from the house, just as it had been almost an hour earlier driving towards the family home.
But he was blissfully unaware of that and was already implementing the next stage of his plan.
He got back onto the N1 just after 10am and drove straight back to Dublin.
Seven minutes later, he decided to send Rachel a text, pretending to be the perfect husband, but ultimately sealing his own fate as a wife killer.
At 10.07, Rachel's phone buzzed to inform her that the text had arrived, as she lay, slowly dying from inhaling her own blood.
The text said: "You and the boys sleep okay? Wish Jacqui (Rachel's friend) a happy birthday for me. XXX"
The text was sent from O'Reilly's phone as he drove along the N1, close to Blake's Cross.
Some 21 minutes later, at 10.38, it was O'Reilly's phone that went, to signal he had a call coming in.
By this stage, he was around the city centre, close to Park House on the North Circular Road.
The call was from his colleague Derek Quearney, who he was supposed to be with at the bus depot.
By 11am, he had managed to get to Broadstone.
Looking calm and collected he met up with Quearney and they headed off in convoy, with the former soldier driving his Citroen Xsara in front and O'Reilly's navy Fiat Marea following.
They drove down Church Street and turned right on to the Quays, where they headed towards Heuston and then on to Chapelizod, before finally making it back to Bluebell Industrial Estate and Viacom, just before midday.
Once he got into the office, his composure had disappeared – perhaps he had time in the journey to think about what he had just done.
Colleague Michelle Slattery saw him as he went to get a cup of coffee.
She couldn't help noticing his face was red, his eyes puffy.
And when she told him he looked like shite, he simply replied: "Ah, Jesus," before walking off.
Once ensconced in the safety of his office, O'Reilly decided to play the doting husband again by ringing his wife to see how she was – in reality he was carrying out a clumsy attempt to cover his tracks by trying to show he hadn't just been at the house.
He left another voicemail on Rachel's mobile, again asking how she was at around midday.
Then, at 12.50, Rachel got another call. This time it was from Helen Reddy at Adam's crèche, wondering why she hadn't picked up the tot.
"Just giving you a ring to see are you on your way and is everything okay," Helen said.
Unknown to her Rachel was slumped on the floor, but probably still alive. Just.
At 1.18 O'Reilly rang again, sounding more urgent this time – why haven't you picked up the kids?
Six minutes later he rang again, sounding even more anxious. ""This is not funny. It's not like you. I am actually worried. Please ring me," he lied.
O'Reilly then rang Rose Callaly's home. Rose got worried and, after leaving a message for her dying daughter herself, decided to head from her home in Whitehall north central Dublin to the Naul.
She left at around 1.35 and got to the house just at 2pm.
She quickly entered the house through the wide open patio doors and started searching for her precious daughter.
She called out her name, but got no response as she slowly walked down the hallway leading to the bedroom.
She got to the bottom of the hallway and was met with a sight that will haunt her forever.
She told O'Reilly's trial: "I looked in and it was then that I noticed Rachel lying on the floor – that was her bedroom.
"She was lying with her head down, but I could not actually tell if her face was lying sideways or straight down because it was in such a state.
"As soon as I saw her I knew she was dead.
"The minute I saw her I knew she was dead and I knew she was murdered.
"I knelt down beside her I remember rubbing her arms and they were cold and hard and I knew she was dead a while.
"I just kept talking to her," she said.
Mrs Callaly said she panicked and left the room and tried unsuccessfully to ring for an ambulance on her mobile.
She went back up to the kitchen and searched for Rachel's new phone but could not find it – so she went back towards her dead daughter.
She said: "I was in such a panic and went back down and I knelt down beside her again and I spoke to her again.
"I went back up and I noticed the new phone but I didn't know how to use it.
"Eventually some man answered it. I said if you could get help, my daughter's dead.
"It was just a random number."
Moments later, Rose walked out of the house and was greeted by O'Reilly who had just arrived at the home.
He had a smile on his face.
But it quickly vanished when Rose told him she thought his wife, her daughter, was dead.
He ran into the bedroom and touched his wife on the back, before saying to her: "Jesus, Rachel, what did you do?" He tried a bit of CPR.
Gardai and paramedics quickly came on the scene.
When he was told his wife was dead O'Reilly played a stormer. He punched the doorframe in despair before steadying himself on the door.
He must have thought he had got away with it.
He had an alibi that put him 15 miles away at the time of the murder. His mother in law found the body. He left increasingly frantic messages on Rachel's phone and he seemed devastated when told she was dead.
But he was wrong. Two and a half years later, justice would finally catch up with him.

Talking to a killer...

2008-12-06T22:06:00.010Z

"All I can remember is the kids shouting `stop it daddy, please stop it'."

HE BRINGS his face to within a few inches of the reinforced glass panel separating us. Cradling the phone between his shoulder and ear, he pauses, seemingly in an effort to summon up the courage to say what needs to be said. Then the words leap out of his mouth.
"I punched her once on the face and she went down," he machineguns.
Simultaneously, there is a bam! He balls his right hand into a tight fist and punches his left palm. Hard.
He can't stop. It's as if what he did to his woman three years earlier has been festering inside him ever since and now is the time to purge himself. He keeps talking.
"I just lost it. My mind has gone blank after that, but I have been told I beat her for around 10 minutes. My lawyer told me I used repeated blows against her and I have to accept it. I saw the photographs of what I did to her – I couldn't even recognise her. Her face was all purple. It was fucking terrible."
That was how, sitting in the visitors' area of Villena prison near Alicante in southern Spain, Paul Hickey told me how he beat his partner, Celine Conroy, to a pulp. And then some more. She lay alone, dying slowly, for up to seven hours after the attack. After he finished with her, he got a shower and went to sleep.
It would probably be more comforting to people if he had two heads: but the reality was he was depressingly normal. He didn’t look evil. He just looked like an ordinary young fella from central Dublin. His hair was cropped tight, he had a few spots on his face, the tracksuit was a bit grubby. You could be sitting beside him on the bus in the morning.
But killers are, largely, like that. Ask anyone who sat through the Joe O’Reilly trial in June and July last year, or Brian Kearney’s case earlier this year. Both men were frighteningly ordinary. On the outside anyway. O’Reilly is the coldest, most unfeeling man I’ve ever had the displeasure of being close to in my life.
Hickey’s so matter of fact about what he has just said that it takes a few seconds for what he has told me to sink in.
Holy Shit. This is huge. (This is a reporter being honest. When he told me I immediately knew I had a front page story. That was the first thing that went through my head. A decent, normal, person would probably have recalled in horror and tried to smash through the glass to get at him. But we’re neither decent nor normal when it comes to getting stories. We’ll probably pay for it someday. It was only hours later, when the adrenaline wore off, that I thought, really thought, about what he said. That’s when it hits you. The reality is, however, that I’m not there as a person. I’m there to take down what he says and put it in the paper.)
But there there's more, much more, to come from him. I ask him about his and Celine's three kids. They were in the house in San Fulgencio, near Alicante, when he slaughtered her in August 2005.None of the media covering his trial in Spain in November really knew what the kids saw, me included. We knew that he made the two eldest children walk past her body after he beat her so badly she died maybe seven hours later. But what about during the horrendous onslaught he unleashed upon her? Were they in the next room, oblivious? Or did they see the whole thing?
Hickey gives me a gruesome clarity on my question. It's the latter.
"Did Celine say anything when you were hitting her?" I ask.
"All I can remember is the kids shouting `stop it daddy, please stop it,'" he admits.
"I think I heard her say `Ah' when she was on the ground, but she didn't say anything else. I must have knocked her out with the first punch."
Occasionally, when you're interviewing someone, small sentences have huge import. In just 14 words, he has conveyed the full, unedited horror of what happened that night in August 2005. You're probably seeing it in your mind's eye as you're reading this: a nine year old boy, his six year old sister both appealing to their daddy to stop beating their mummy. Do they watch from a few feet, or do they try to get in his way? Who knows? But, either way, he doesn't listen. Instead, he keeps up the kicking, punching – biting even – until Celine is on the ground, unconscious. Dying.
His brutal honesty leaves me reeling and, honestly, excited at the same time. Reeling because it's a terrible sensation sitting across from someone who is, almost nonchalantly, describing beating a woman to death; excited because it's a great story. He's never spoken about it before.
I'd been expecting, in a way hoping, that he would have said the kids saw nothing. In fact, if you believe him, Celine's two eldest kids saw the whole brutal beating he callously and casually doled out to her.
A few minutes earlier, I had sat down opposite him in the yellow painted visitors' both of the prison. It was just like in the movies: he was behind reinforced plexiglass. We had to communicate via a phone handset.
I said hello. He smiled said hello back. Then it was down to business. I didn't think there was much point exchanging pleasantries with him. I wasn't there as a friend. I was there to ask him some questions.
Two days earlier, when he appeared in court in Elche and admitted beating Celine to death, he gave no explanation for what he did. Celine's mother, Sandra, later told reporters she had one question for him. "Why did you do it Paul? Why? I know we'll never get an answer, he's not man enough to give us an answer."
I gave it a go. It was really the only question to ask him.
I looked him in the eye and said: "What happened, Paul? Why did you do it?"
I was expecting some bullshit answer; that they had a row and she provoked him. But he was honest – or seemed to be. Only he knows why he did it. But, to me, he looked like he was speaking the truth.
He gives me his version of events.
With a slight, nervous, smile on his face, he says: "I had not been sleeping for days and I could hear voices in my head."Everywhere I went I could see people looking at me. Everyone was."On the night it happened, I felt terrible and went to a cafe nearby where I got a big glass of Hennessy. That must have had something to do with it."I went back up to the house and Celine was there."I started cooking and then asked her if she would do it for me."She said something like `Yeah, I will now.' There was no aggression or anything from her."But I just looked at her and said `What did you say?' and went up to her."
Here he explains how he went up a matter of millimetres from her face and got two of his fingers and prised open the eyelids on her left eye. He said he could see some sign inside the eye, like an X or a cross."I punched her once on the face and she went down. There was no reason for what I did. She didn't do anything to provoke me.
"My mind just went blank after I hit her the first time. I just lost it. I'll never be able to explain why I did it because there was no reason for it."
So that's it. This woman lost her life. Her kids lost their mother. Hickey lost everything. And he can't explain why he did it.
He then goes on to talk about the rough time he has been having in the prison, one of the most dangerous in Spain. He tells how a former cell mate tried to rape him, but he managed to fight him off. He tells how he had to share a cell with an English paedophile for a few months. And then he tells me how he was stabbed by Spanish gypsy, who put it up to him on a landing one day.
He motions to show me the puncture wounds on his body. Most are on his abdomen
but he also has one on his left forearm. As he lifts up his sleeve, I see a huge
black tattoo: Celine.
"When did you get that done?"
He looks away. "In here."
This guy is either crazy or evil. After he beats her to death, he gets her name tattooed on her arm. "Why did you do that?" I ask, incredulous.
"Because I still love her and always will. I can think of only two other times where we had a physical fight – we really loved each other." You know, I think he meant it. He was obviously so violent to her in the past that he has rationalised what he – he thinks he just went a bit too far, but didn’t mean to kill her.
In fact, he later says it was an accident and that he’s truly sorry for what he did. Only he knows if that’s a lie.
After about 40 minutes, the phone line goes dead. Visiting time is up. He smiles, knocks on the plexiglass and signals for me to ring him sometime in the future.
I walked out towards the freedom of the gates. He went back to his cell. Normal life resumed.

For the record, here is a list of injuries Celine Conroy suffered at the hands of Hickey on the night he killed her:

• A 2cm cut on her right upper eyelid • A 2.5 cm long graze on her right cheek • A 4cm graze, also on her right cheek • A haematoma on each of her eye sockets • A bruise on her right forehead • Bruising and swelling on bridge of nose • A 1.5cm bruise under her chin • Bruising of the nose • A 1cm cut to the nose
• Another 1.5 cm cut to the nose • A 1.5 cm cut to the left upper eyelid • A massive bruise to the left half of her face • A cut to the left corner of her mouth • A cut to the lower left lip • Bruising to both ears • Bleeding from both ears • A lesion 4.5cms by 0.5cm on the right upper chest • A bruise to the upper right chest, measuring 3.5cm by 2cm • Another bruise in the same area, again measuring 3.5cm by 2cm
• A bruise between her breasts measuring 5cms by 3cms • A 2cm bruise to the left side of her throat • A swelling to her left collar bone • Four irregular bruises down the right side of her torso • Another bruise, this time 3cm long and in the shape of a half moon on her right side • Bruising to the right abdomen • A bruise 3cm by 4cm to the pubic area • A 2cm gash to the left abdomen • Bruising to the left buttock • A 0.5cm graze to her left ankle • A 3cm by 2cm bruise to her left forearm • A 4cm by 2cm to her upper left arm • An 8cm by 2cm bruise on her right forearm • A 5cm by 4cm bruise on her right elbow • All but two of the teeth had been beaten or kicked out of her upper jaws.
That's what he did to her.

*

It had taken me two days to get into the prison to see him – and it just goes show that luck plays a massive part in getting a story. It all started when Hickey (31) was frogmarched into the tiny underground courtroom in Elche on Wednesday, November 12. He was there to face the charge of murdering Celine at the San Fulgencio apartment on August 28, 2005. There were around 15 Irish and Spanish media people there to report on it: Celine's horrific death had made the headlines when it happened and the trial would be no different.

Two Policia Nacional officers walked the shackled Hickey into the courthouse through a side entrance. Around an hour later, he was standing in front of the judge. We had all been expecting him to plead not guilty, even though the weight of evidence against him, in the shape of witnesses and forensics, was compelling at the very least. The reason we thought he was going to fight the case was that the state and Celine's family were demanding a 20 year jail term. But, as often happens in the Spanish system, there was a last minute deal. The state and family (who in Spain have the right to bring their own criminal prosecution against a suspect) both agreed to drop the formal murder charge in return for a plea to of guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter. The deal was he'd do 15 years. With remission and the sentence being backdated to when he killed her, he'll be out by 2015. Celine's family, through, gritted teeth, accepted the deal. Hickey stood up in the small, airless courtroom at about 5pm to accept that he killed her.

I was, with other reporters, sitting across from him. I looked over at him – I was only around 10 feet away – and caught his eye. He looked back at me and nodded. What's the protocol for interacting with a killer? Do you ignore him? Do you give him a dirty look? Do you give the him the finger? If you're a normal member of society, you'd probably do all three – but reporters aren't normal people. We're freaks who look at everything the prism of getting a story. Everything else comes second. So I nodded back at him. He smiled slightly and raised his eyebrows as if to say: `I'm really, really in trouble here. Terrible, isn't it" I nodded again and went back to listening to the proceedings. A few moments later, I looked over towards him and, again, he caught my eye. Again we had a silent, secret, conversation. I knew I was in with him. I knew I had a chance.

In Ireland, reporters don't speak to prisoners as they are led to and from court: but this wasn't Ireland. The very fact that the judge had allowed the camera people and photographers into the court building to get Hickey showed that Irish rules didn't apply. Bring a camera into an Irish court complex and you'll soon be getting familiar with prison food. A few minutes later, the case was adjourned for an hour or so and everyone filed out of the court. I dawdled more than usual as all the other hacks rushed outside, with good reason. They were eager to see Celine's loved ones’ reaction to Hickey as hew paraded past them. I thought I could get a few words with Hickey as he was being led away – the quotes might make a decent angle for my story. His cuffed wrists were in front of him as he was led out past me. "How are you?" I asked, "Do you want to say anything?" "I'm grand," came the surprisingly cheery reply. And then this: "Come in and see me and I'll tell you the whole story..." "Okay. Where are ya?" I was frantic for the answer; he was now a few feet beyond me, being led out by the police. "Veeyeno," he shouted over his shoulder.

Great. Where the hell is that, I wondered, rather frantically. I thought there was only one prison in Alicante, called Fontcalente. Maybe he was in another part of Spain. While I was digesting this, all hell was breaking loose outside the courtroom. Relatives of Celine got stuck into him, verbally, as he was led out. In front of the press and their unblinking cameras, he launched a volley of abuse at them. "Shout your mouth," he shouted and then laughed at her family.

Afterwards, a few hacks sidled up to me and asked me what I had said to him. I, truthfully, said he told me he was grand. I just forgot to mention the invitation to visit him in prison. Oops.

We had around an hour to wait until he came back, so I got busy. I'm lucky enough to speak bad Spanish so I managed to talk to the one friendly cop, who told me Hickey was housed in Villena Prison, about 30 miles from Elche. I then sidled up to his lawyer. "Any chance of a chat with him? He said he wanted to talk to me..." "I will ask him..." "Thank you..." "...tomorrow." Ah. "Is it possible you could do it now, tonight? You could give him my card." "I will do it tomorrow." I had to strike while the iron was hot. So tried another tack. I approached Hickey's (Dutch) interpreter – he agreed to give him my card. The hour passed and eventually Hickey came back to hear that the jury had accepted the plea bargain. The interpreter came up to me and told me he had given my card to the lawyer. But, I wondered, would he give it to Hickey? Moments later, Hickey was brought out of court in handcuffs again and my photographer colleague Jim Walpole got this picture of him. It was just one frame, but it highlighted perfectly the contempt Hickey showed for everyone that day, especially Celine’s family.

The next day we headed up to Villena. I tried to get in to see him there and then – but they said I needed to make an appointment for the following day. All we had to do now was wait. And hope. We had to hope that he authorities would let us in; that Hickey would have been given my card and that he would still want to talk to us.

(This is Villena Prison, in another photo taken by Jim Walpole. Hickey is housed in an area to the right of the guard tower.) The appointment was for 6.30pm – we got there an hour early, just in case. In cases like this, it's hard to control your nerves. I was pacing up and down in the circular reception area before my appointment was processed. You can't help but get the jitters. You know you're so close to getting a scoop, and you've been stupid enough to tell your bosses back home that you think you'll get in all right. They're waiting by the phone so they can design the front page – if things go to plan. Jim was trying to keep me calm – something that's quite hard to do as I do get ratty when I'm nervous. He was also trying to get a few secret snaps, so it was somewhat tense.

After what seemed an eternity I was called to the counter. The prison official checked my passport against the registered visitors for the day. "Señor O-tu-lay...?" "That's me." "Ok, puede entrar. Tiene que esperar unos minutos." Having to wait a few minutes was no problem, I assured him. I was in. But then disaster. They were refusing to let Jim Walpole in – we hadn't given his passport details the previous day. Now it was up to me to bring in a camera and take a sly shot of Hickey. Still, a snap by a talentless amateur like me is better than no photograph at all. We had already disabled the flash and shutter noise on my small digital camera, so I could take a pic without being seen or heard.

It was a great plan and it would have worked perfectly were it not for those pesky Spaniards and their high – tech prison security. I had to go through an airport style metal detector to get into the prison proper. Camera, phone, watch, money – everything was taken off me. I went through one set of electronic gates, then another.

Then, with other visitors, I was told to walk through a door and found myself in the exercise area of the prison. It was a large gray yard. We walked to the bottom right of it, where another door opened. Through another set of electronic doors and we were in the visiting section of the part, or module, of the jail where Hickey was being held.

I desperately scanned every isolated booth, looking for the pale young Irish man. My stomach was churning – what if he didn't get the card? What if he didn't want to know? In the corner of my eye, I noticed rapid movement in one of the booths. It was Hickey; he was waving his hands to get my attention. He smiled as I walked into the booth and closed the door.

He was sitting down, wearing the same tracksuit he had worn to court just two days earlier. He held up the phone on his side and motioned me to do the same with the one to my right. "Hello," I said. "Hello," he replied. He explained why he agreed to see me. “I remember you from the trial. I remember you looking over at me and saying hello. I thought you looked like a decent fella, so I thought I would pick you.”

And then he started talking.

Hello

2008-12-01T23:30:00.000Z

“Please. No. Please. Just go away. Please.”

Your heart is beating so ferociously it feels like it’s about to leap through your ribcage. Your mouth is dry. Your knees are weak. As you walk up to the door, you are silently praying for two things to happen. Firstly, you’re hoping the person on the other side of the door will talk to you. Secondly, you’re hoping they’ll pass on the chance to give you a damn good kicking.
Welcome to the world of the doorstep – the worst part of any journalist’s job.
Some reporters can’t do it. They simply can’t walk up to a house and ask to speak to whoever is inside, particularly if it’s a story about someone who has just been murdered and you’re hoping to persuade their family to speak to you. Who can blame them? It’s a tough gig.
I did my first one while I was on work experience, almost 15 years ago. It was an approach to the family of a man shot dead in the New Lodge area of north Belfast by loyalists. I was terrified. The family said no to my timid approach. I must have done hundreds of doorsteps since then. It doesn’t get any easier. I still get terrified every time I knock on the door.
It could be approaching the home of a family who had a child killed in an accident a day earlier. It could be confronting a paedophile, back in the community after serving his time for committing horrendous, unspeakable, crimes against kids. It could be approaching the family of a criminal, shot dead for losing €30,000 worth of heroin.
Approaching a house where people are coming to terms with a tragedy that has visited them - or who really, really don’t want to talk to a reporter - is as scary as it gets. It’s scary because you’re worried you might just get beaten to a pulp. It’s also scary because, when you’re approaching good people to whom something bad has just happened, you’re terrified they’ll look at you with nothing but contempt, before asking you how you can do your job and sleep at night.
You spend a couple of minutes sitting in the car a few doors away, talking strategy with your photographer colleague. We agree that I’ll do the doorstep myself – two people often look more intimidating than one. And anyway, if things kick off, the snapper won’t be too far away. He’ll come and help me if there is a problem – after, of course, getting the pics.
You get out of the car, parked with the engine running and facing out of the estate in case you need to make a quick getaway. You take a deep breath and walk up the path. Sometimes, as you approach the door, you hope no-one is there, that your knock will go unanswered. That you can go back to the office and say you tried.
You arrive at the door. You take a deep breath. You knock. After a few seconds, the door opens. Now it’s all about who’s on the other side of the door. Rather, it’s all about how they’ll react to you. You can usually tell before they even say a word. You know by their body language whether they’re going to talk to you or not. Sometimes they politely decline. Sometimes they chase you away, spit at you, threaten you or even try to hit you.
Sometimes you wish they had hit you, rather than say what they said to you. A punch would have been less painful.
A day after the Omagh bomb, of August 15 1998, I was sent to Buncrana, Co Donegal by the Irish News. Three young children from that town had been killed in the bomb. I had to doorstep each family to see if they would talk.
The first family, that of James Barker, brought me in and gave me a full interview. The second family, that of Sean McLaughlin, did the same. Each also gave me a photograph of their boy. The third family, of young Oran Doherty, declined. The man who answered the door, who I can only assume was the young boy’s father, said something that has stayed with me - haunted me - to this day. I told him I was a journalist, that I was sorry for his loss and asked if I could speak to him. He looked at me, shocked and appalled, and appealed to me to go away. “Please. No. Please. Just go away. Please.” I apologised, walked away and slithered back under the rock whence I had come.
A few days later, I was doing another doorstep, this time in Omagh. It was the family of young Deborah Cartwright, a teenager killed in the bomb. I teamed up with a British reporter for it: there was no point in both of us doing it separately. Her father, an RUC officer, was standing in the garden, his hands in his pockets, staring at the grass. I took the lead. Again, I asked if he would speak to us. He said no. I apologised and walked away, expecting the reporter with me to also retreat. However, as I was walking away, I heard her angrily exclaim to him: ` What? Not even a word?’ I didn’t wait to hear his reply. I got out of there as quickly as I could.
Both those events taught me one thing: if people want to talk, they will. If they don’t, nothing you can do can persuade them. I have a rule that, if someone says no, I don’t go back and ask a second time. It’s pointless and just causes the family more anguish.
But sometimes people do talk.
Sometimes they bring you, a complete stranger, into their house, sit you down and talk to you about the loved one they’ve just lost. I used to wonder why they did. I’d tell whatever photographer I was with, if a reporter ever called to my door, I’d chase them. The photographer usually agreed – but they really don’t like reporters.
But then, after several years, I realised why so many of them opened the door, let me in and let it all out. Some people just like to talk to strangers about their grief. In April 2000, when I had been a journalist for six odd years, my own father, Gerald, died suddenly abroad. When it happened, all I wanted to do was talk about it. To anybody who would listen. I realised there and then why some people speak to me and other reporters on death knocks: they just like to get it out. Sometimes it helps talking to a complete stranger.
And sometimes seeing the face of your loved one on the front page of The Irish Daily Star – where I am Crime Correspondent – or other papers, gives validation to the victim. That they counted. That they were important. That they were necessary.
It’s the worst part of being a crime reporter. Sitting there as a mother tells you how much she’ll miss her son. Trying awkwardly to comfort her when she breaks down in tears. Hoping the ground will swallow you up when a father reacts angrily to your request for an interview.
This isn’t an appeal for pity: the feelings of a hack are nothing, less than nothing, in comparison to their suffering.
I’m just trying to show what it is like to be a crime correspondent in Ireland today. I want to talk about crime and what it’s like to report on it.
Being a crime reporter today is the most interesting, the most frightening, the most exciting, the most rewarding and most challenging of jobs. Read on and I’ll tell you why...