Ian Bailey today told the High Court he was suing the gardaí and the State to highlight the wrong done to him and to seek compensation.
His cross-examination by senior counsel for the State, Luán O Braonáin, began in the High Court when he was asked if he hoped to establish his innocence. Mr Bailey replied: “I am here as part of the compensatory process”.
When asked was he now saying he was not here to establish his innocence, he said: “I am here to highlight the civil wrong committed against me by your clients”.
Cross-examination of Mr Bailey, who who is suing for his alleged wrongful arrest for the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier in west Cork in 1996, resumes next Tuesday. The State denies his claims.
Earlier, he told his own counsel Martin Giblin he was bringing the case to “establish once and for all I had nothing to do it (the murder) and I am a victim of a conspiracy”.
He said: “It is to clear my name and ultimately to try knock out the dirty rotten stinking lies perpetuated by members of the Garda Síochána.”
He said his solicitor wrote to one of the witnesses, Marie Farrell, after she recanted a statement putting him near the scene of the the murder, and told her he (Mr Bailey) would not be suing her.
Asked why, he said: “Because I am a victim of this, but she is a victim as well who was put in a situation that was not of her on volition and making.”
The parents of Ms Toscan du Plantier had brought civil proceedings against Mr Bailey in Ireland, but they were later discontinued and he was awarded costs against them. He decided not to purse them for those costs. and said He had done that because “they are victims as well”.
Mr Bailey said he had suffered physically and mentally in the last 18 years and only in the last 12 months had some of his pre-arrest “joie de vivre” returned. He had to learn to “harden up emotionally” or he would have been destroyed.
Mr Bailey also told the court information emerged during his fight against extradition in which it was alleged a minister for justice had sought to have the journalist prosecuted for the murder.
Just before the Supreme Court overturned an order that he be extradited, the court was informed that former west Cork chief state solicitor Malachi Boohig had been told at a meeting with senior gardaí in 1998 that then justice minister John O’Donoghue “had used his influence to bring a prosecution against me”, Mr Bailey said.
Mr Boohig brought this to the attention of then DPP Eamonn Barnes, he said. Mr Barnes’s “conscience was pricked” in circumstances where Mr Bailey’s extradition was being sought and that was why this information came out, he said.
Despite the Supreme Court decision, Mr Bailey said he is now still effectively a prisoner in Ireland and cannot visit family members in the UK. If he set foot in another EU country, the entire extradition process could begin again, he said.
He had also been unable to visit his mother before she died in 2010 or even go to her funeral which was “the cruelest abuse of this whole thing”.
He could not even challenge the warrant in France because he had no legal standing there (locus standii) to do so.
Mr Bailey also told the court told gardaí were heavy handed when they arrived at his home five minutes before midnight to execute a European Arrest Warrant for his extradition on April 28th, 2010. It was just two weeks before his final law exams in University College Cork and he felt the timing was deliberate to try to “discombobulate me”.
He had become very concerned when he learned the gardaí had handed over to the French authorities their complete file on their own investigation, which was erroneous, “full of lies” and had been repeatedly rejected.
He was brought to Dublin and placed in a Mountjoy jail cell with an open sewer and where “you wouldn’t put a dog”, he said. When he complained that it wasn’t fit for an animal, he was told “it is one of the best, which is hard to believe”.
He feared he was going to be “shipped out” and taken to another jurisdiction, but he was released on bail pending the hearing of his extradition case which he ultimately won.
“Had they succeeded, I would probably be now rotting in some French hole,” he said.
After losing libel actions in the Circuit Court against the media, some of which he succeeded in on appeal, he returned home to find eight “vigilantes” in the fields outside his house calling on him to come out.
He was going to do so, but his partner Jules Thomas said no and instead she went out “and got rid of them and told them to go to hell”.
There were other incidents in which paint was daubed on walls and a dead rat dropped, the court was told.
The hearing resumes next Tuesday.