It is a fair bet that in March 1996, when most people heard about the murder of Tom Nevin, the images that came to mind were like something from the movies. A car speeding southward from a housing estate somewhere in Dublin, then pulling up outside Jack White's Inn in Brittas Bay. Nervous men in anoraks and trainers, with stockings over their faces and shotguns in their hands, breaking through the door. A sudden, terrible irruption of violence and cruelty into a happy Irish home.

We now know that Catherine Nevin had seen those movies, too, and that she was acting one of them out that night. After she let the hired killer in to murder her husband, she tried to create a convincing scenario. She pulled drawers out on to the floor and scattered her jewellery. She had herself tied up like a helpless victim. She laid out for us and for the Garda Siochana a classic crime scene intended to confirm our basic assumptions about the nature of violent crime. Probably, she herself felt that this was the way such terrible events normally unfolded.

Those assumptions are at once terrifying and oddly comforting. The thought of being the victim of dark forces out there somewhere in the hinterlands of normal life is the stuff of all our nightmares. It has, moreover, just enough reality to be a reasonable fear. But it is also, in its own way, an exercise in escapism. It fends off the much more disturbing truth that the known is scarier than the unknown.

The biggest threat is not out there somewhere in the anonymous dark. It has a local habitation and a name. The location is familiar and intimate, the city, town or village where ordinary people live. The name is that of a neighbour, a friend, a lover, a spouse.

This, in a sense, was the flaw in Catherine Nevin's logic. Like the rest of us, she seemed to have operated on the premise that gardai investigating the murder of her husband would look first for distant strangers, hardened urban criminals who had mounted a raid across the border into Wicklow.

In fact, gardai know from experience that the usual suspects in a non-terrorist murder are people who know the victim well. Around the Western world, 90 per cent of murders are committed by relatives or acquaintances of the victim.

The murders that grip our imaginations in movies and crime novels - the opportunistic attacks, the stalkings on the street, the crazed violence of serial killers - are the exceptions. For every Hannibal Lecter or Myra Hindley, there are dozens of ordinary people driven to murder by banal emotions of greed, anger and humiliation. And even the serial killers may turn out, like Dr Harold Shipman, to be respected and trusted pillars of the community.

And this is not just true of murder. International studies consistently suggest that for all violent crimes, the victims are likely to know their attackers. The most recent figures from the Justice Department in the United States, for example, show that in the case of 78 per cent of female victims and 51 per cent of male victims of violent assaults, the perpetrator was a relative, acquaintance, lover, former lover, spouse or former spouse of the victim. Violence, in other words, tends to be woven into the fabric of ordinary life.

And somewhere even within the acknowledged image of criminality, there is a half-hidden reflection of what goes on within families. Paul O'Mahoney's study of prisoners in Mountjoy Prison, for example, found an extraordinarily high correlation between crime and the failure of families. Only 58 per cent of the prisoners were found to have been brought up by both of their parents until the age of 16.

This is not to suggest that all of the rest necessarily came from violent homes or were themselves incarcerated for violent crimes. But the figures do hint at some strong connection between crime on the one hand and the failure of the family on the other.

We know, too, that the cases that come to court represent a minority of the violent acts in the home. The latest Irish figures, for 1998, show that while 8,448 incidents of domestic violence were reported to the Garda and 1,232 people were injured in these incidents, there were only 1,808 arrests, 1,371 charges and 772 convictions.

Considering that a great deal of domestic violence goes unreported, it is clear that there is a much larger backdrop of brutality within the home than ever comes to public attention.

Time and again, when high-profile murder cases are eventually solved in Ireland, a high proportion turn out to have been committed by someone within the victim's extended family or local community. Yet we persist in thinking of terrible violence as something inflicted on the community from the outside.

THERE is, indeed, almost an established ritual for media treatment of murders that are not obviously connected to political terror campaigns or to organised crime. A set of instant cliches is brought to bear on the story. The victim's family is decent and well-liked. The place where the murder has happened is quiet and normal, the last place you would expect such horror. The peaceful, respectable community is shocked and stunned. No one can remember anything like this ever happening before.

None of these responses is dishonest or untrue: most places really are quiet and normal, most communities peaceful and respectful. Everyone really is numbed by the sudden taking of a life. But quiet, normal communities contain banal brutalities. Peaceful places harbour violent emotions. Decent, wellliked families sometimes have awful secrets. Dreadful acts may appear as an exotic, unimaginable revelation. But much more often than we like to imagine, what they express is something ordinary and intimate.

One of the reasons we find it hard to grasp this obvious truth is that murders appear to us as sudden, unexpected occurrences. But, in the words of the psychologist Shervent Frazier, "murder is not an event, but a process."

The final act of violence is almost always the culmination of a pattern that has been emerging for a long time. And the other parts of that pattern may be apparently trivial, seemingly "normal" acts - insults, slights, lies, the petty cruelties that many people come to take for granted in their private lives.

The murder of Tom Nevin is a particularly stark example: a killing that was talked about, hinted at, openly desired and actively canvassed for years before it happened.

With hindsight, Catherine Nevin's behaviour seems bizarrely flagrant, so much so that it actually constituted one of the most potent arguments for the defence. Would a woman who was planning to murder her husband talk so openly to virtual strangers about her desire to kill him?

Yet, while this process was unfolding in the semi-public arena of the pub that was also the Nevin family home, it clearly didn't look like the prelude to murder. It looked, presumably, like a part of ordinary daily life in an ordinary Irish community. It looked like that because that is precisely what it was.

Caught in her own web - Kathy Sheridan on Catherine Nevin, Weekend

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