GUBU

                  

It is 1822 and Thomas Marks has the iron hook which replaced one of his hands tight on the neck of Catherine Hanrahan, a young pregnant woman. 

Marks is a one of six bailiffs, send to collect money by seizing property towards securing rent owed to the Kilkenny/Waterford landlord Pierce Forristal by Hanrahan's father Thomas Power. Marks had collared Hanrahan after she and two other women tried to usher the family's pigs to safety. She breaks free of his grip and makes a run for it. Marks calmly puts one foot on a stone, rests his pistol on his knee and shoots her in the back. She dies in agony six days later. 

The RIC, newly constituted, has been spreading terror in the general area and there is not much reason to be confident that any agent of the powerful will be adequately punished in court. Another bailiff William Cooney testifies that Hanrahan struck Marks two or three times with a wattle and called, as Gaeilge, for someone to come and ''knock the black Protestant's brains out''. Cooney further claims that the pistol accidentally went off when Marks fell on the ground. 

Key evidence is provided by a doctor who testifies that Hanrahan could not have been shot in the manner she was (horizontally) unless both she and Marks were on the same level. The jury makes its decision in a matter of minutes, acquitting Marks of murder but finding him guilty of manslaughter. Justice is served to some extent and he gets six months.

A hundred years passed, it is 1922. Marks, Hanrahan and all the collated and filed ghosts of British justice and bureaucracy are trapped in the inferno of the Public Record Office at the Four Courts. The clock can now be set at Year Zero for the nascent Irish state. The six year old promise to cherish all the children of the nation equally is already half forgotten. Churchill and Lloyd George are smiling to themselves, they have an obvious interest in seeing us fail. Time will tell if we can prove them wrong.

Sixty years later and it is not looking good. It is 1982 and an ambulance has its siren going, as its driver seeks to escort a Renault 5 to St. James's Hospital. In the back seat, soaked in her own blood, is the car's owner Bridie Gargan, a young nurse. In the driver's seat is Malcolm MacArthur, a dicky-bowed man about town. He has the look of a consultant and the car has a hospital parking permit, hence the unsought escort for what must have looked like a terrible accident.

But there has been no accident. In order to subdue Gargan and get her keys, MacArthur has bludgeoned her with a lump hammer. He intends to drive to Edenderry, where he plans to take a shotgun from Donal Dunne, the young farmer who advertised it, so that he can rob a bank and secure his lifestyle. 

MacArthur swerves the ambulance at the hospital gates and abandons the car and Gargan beside the Central Bank. He finds his way to Edenderry by bus and meets up with Dunne. Asking to try out the shotgun in a deserted patch of bog, he shoots Dunne in the face and drags the dead or dying man into bushes. After driving back to Dublin in Dunne's Ford Escort, he tries and fails to rob an American diplomat, then holes up at the apartment of a close friend, the Attorney General Patrick Connolly SC. The two had attended an All-Ireland semi-final the previous Sunday, where they sat together in the VIP box and shook hands with the Garda Commissioner Patrick McLaughlin.

Connolly asks the barrister Taoiseach Charles Haughey if he should allow the affair to interrupt his plans for a holiday in New York. Haughey wishes him a good trip. The press scrum which greets Connolly in New York makes him think instead about going back home, which he later does. Haughey takes it all in his stride and describes the events in adjectives Conor Cruise O'Brien arranges into GUBU - grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented. 

The barristers defy public anger, close ranks and protect their own. A five minute 'trial' puts the unpleasantness to bed. It is agreed (primarily between the DPP Eamonn Barnes BL and MacArthur's counsel Paddy MacEntee SC) to have MacArthur plead guilty to Gargan's murder and leave Dunne's murder unprosecuted. 

The presiding judge James MacMahon (I don't have confirmation of his being a senior counsel) refuses to allow the prosecution to read a statement of evidence into the record. Instead he allows MacEntee to enter into the record a psychological report claiming that MacArthur was not a danger to society - with the apparent intention that this will later be used to secure for MacArthur an early release. But the public, and a media which was at that time far from separate from the public, holds the upper hand and makes sure that MacArthur is kept in some form of captivity for 30 years. 

Forty years later, it is 2022 and a century of national independence is complete. The barristers have learned a lesson, but it is not the lesson - of humility and service - they needed to learn. They have taken near total control of media where they need it, mostly through a weaponization of defamation law and an attendant expectation of legal advice being sought before publishing, also by controlling the reporting of controversial court cases through what are effectively press releases. 

Malcolm MacArthur, ten years a free man, can be seen once again attending art exhibitions, book launches and such around the city centre. In the suburbs, Keith Conlon lies in a disused golf bunker with a bullet in his head, soon to die. The murder and manslaughter trial of the senior counsel who has shot him will be a masterclass in leprechaun law. 

We have made a lot of progress since 1822, and a little progress since 1922. But some things have gone backwards.