Ian Bailey cross-examination puts spotlight on narratives

Having spent much of the week poring over Ian Bailey's early life, his first forays into journalism and his move to Ireland in the early 1990s, the State's cross-examination of the 57- year-old English man yesterday zoned in on the days before and after the killing of Sophie Toscan du Plantier.

The murder of the French film-maker in the days leading up to Christmas 1996 was, in the words of senior counsel Luán Ó Braonáin, “the biggest story ever to hit Schull”.

It was a story Bailey would tell, as a freelance journalist engaged by the local and national press, before he found himself being cast – with no justification, he argues – as a central character.

The court has heard a lot about conflicting “narratives”, the construction of news and the complex interplay between the media, the Garda and their sources. Bailey has argued that gardaí fed the media stories about him after the murder. Yesterday lawyers for the State focused on the stories Bailey himself put into circulation in the days and weeks after the murder.

For several hours the court parsed a series of newspaper clippings, their old-fashioned design and dated imagery a reminder of how much time has passed since the events under scrutiny. Some of the people sitting in court would have been young children in 1996.

Recycled news

Much of what Bailey contributed to the papers he picked up locally or, more often, “recycled” from other reports that were “out there” already.

“So, as an investigative journalist, you were regurgitating,” asked Ó Braonáin, cross-examining the witness for the State.

He wouldn’t put it that way, Bailey replied. “It was information that was in the public domain. I wrote it in a different fashion.”

For some time before the murder he had been developing a relationship with the Sunday Tribune, and the paper published several stories by him about the killing, occasionally editing out the more "lascivious" bits (Ó Braonáin's word).

One of the stories that carried Bailey’s byline described how Toscan du Plantier’s husband, Daniel, could not come to Ireland to assist gardaí in the immediate aftermath of her murder and to identify her body because he was too busy with business commitments

“It’s shocking, isn’t it?” Bailey said, unprompted. “It’s shocking that this gentleman has lost his wife . . . and wouldn’t come to identify the body.” Bailey found it “very strange and bizarre”. One of the things you do after a murder is look for a motive. “And then you look for people who had a motive . . . That was never done . . . It’s highly, highly suspect.”

Was he suggesting Daniel du Plantier was involved in some way with the death, Ó Braonáin asked. He replied that “you can draw your own conclusions”.

This sounded like “smoke and mirrors,” the barrister said. “I’ll tell you what, you talk to me about smoke and mirrors?” Bailey shot back. Sophie was Daniel’s “third, trophy wife”, he said later, and she had told people in west Cork the marriage was over.

She was leaving her husband and had been involved in a “catfight” with her husband’s “mistress”.

Bailey himself was very interested in “the French connection”. So much so that he once invited gardaí to his home to raise it with them.

By January 1997 Bailey was hearing that he was a suspect. Helen Callanan, then news editor at the Sunday Tribune, told him on the phone one day it was "being said that you did the murder". The court heard she will say that during a conversation with Bailey on February 1st, 1997, he said words to the effect: "Of course, yes I did, I killed her to resurrect my career as a journalist."

It was a “regrettable black joke”, Bailey said, and was “very unwise”. According to Ó Braonáin, Callanan will say she thought about this over the weekend and then called gardaí.

Local resident The court also heard that a local resident, who described taking a lift home from

Bailey after the murder, told gardaí Bailey “out of the blue” had said to him in the car: “I went up there with a rock one night and bashed her f***ing brains in.”

Bailey said he was telling the young man what others were saying about him.

Drawing a line of questioning to a close, Ó Braonáin put it to the witness that gardaí had a number of reasonable grounds – including scratches on his arms, past violence towards his partner, Jules Thomas, and apparent admissions to two people – to justify his arrest.

Bailey rejected this. The scratches were the result of his having cut down a Christmas tree and there were no admissions, he responded.