Ian Bailey case: A long and deeply layered narrative unfurls

Unfurling before the court these past three weeks is a long and deeply layered narrative, and a fluid one.

Accounts evolve. Perspectives shift. Characters come and go. Subplots abound.

And as the case moves towards its second month, and the roll of witnesses grows longer, the picture accretes in new and often – to judge by the rapt faces that fill the public gallery – unpredictable ways.

"It was a mad time," Marie Farrell remarked, giving her account of the events that convulsed west Cork in 1996 and continue to be pored over in court number three almost two decades later. "It was like something surreal."

She told the court of how, in her dealings with gardaí in the days after the killing of Sophie Toscan du Plantier in 1996, they told her Ian Bailey was a strange person who was "into all sorts of weird things". They told her he would sit outside and howl at the moon. When there was a full moon, they added, he would go to Barleycove Beach and sit in a rocking chair as 10 lesbians danced around him reciting poetry.

Three sightings

Ms Farrell, who ran a shop in Schull, has told the court she saw a stranger on three occasions in the days before and after the murder of Ms du Plantier. He was about 5ft 8in, and wore a long black coat and a beret. She told gardaí about the first two sightings but not the third, when she had seen the man stumbling along the road near Schull in the early hours of the day Ms du Plantier’s body was found.

Her reticence, she said, was due to the fact that at the time she saw him she was in the company of a man and her husband thought she was somewhere else.

Instead, using the name “Fiona”, she reported the sighting anonymously. At one point an officer gave her a video showing the man she later knew was Ian Bailey. He wasn’t the man she had seen, she told them.

Yet when gardaí asked her to make a statement saying the man she saw at 2am on December 23rd was Mr Bailey, she agreed. They told her they knew he had killed Ms du Plantier and might kill again. They told her Mr Bailey would confess, so there would be no court case.

Blank pages

At Ballydehob Garda station on February 14th, 1997, she said, Det

Jim Fitzgerald

asked her to sign a number of blank pages and gardaí would write up what she said. She agreed.

“To be honest, I didn’t give it much thought really,” she said.

After that, Ms Farrell added, she began getting daily phone calls from Det Fitzgerald. He was friendly, she said. They would talk about personal life, the investigation, “everything, anything”.

He gave her a Garda phone, so it wouldn’t look suspicious when he called her, though he took that phone back a year later because colleagues needed it for “a drugs bust”.

Phone calls

In court, two of the phone calls were played. The sound quality was so poor only the odd word – mostly “f**kin’”, which punctuated every few lines – could be made out. (The lawyers, judge and jurors had transcripts.)

Ms Farrell told the court that, in May 1997, Det Fitzgerald told her he had been in contact with someone called Graham, “a bit of a down-and-out”, who had known Mr Bailey.

She said the garda told her the plan was to send this man to Mr Bailey's house, get him drunk and high, and then get him to confess to the murder. "This was like something out of Miami Vice," Ms Farrell said.

It was “all supposed to come to an end” when a plan was hatched to get Mr Bailey to come to her ice-cream parlour, where she was to get him to “confess everything”.

Ms Farrell said she approached Mr Bailey in a bar and told him gardaí were trying to set him up, and arranged for him to come to her shop.

Gardaí “wired up” the shop, but Ms Farrell couldn’t activate the recording system because the plug was too big to reach the socket. In the shop, Mr Bailey was “a bit hyper”.

He showed her a poem he had written about two gardaí he believed were trying to set him up, describing how the two officers’ pensions would be gone when he’d finished with them.

Ms Farrell said she later told Det Fitzgerald about the poem. He was “livid” and said he was going to get Mr Bailey.