Yearning for ‘a different life’ brought Bailey to west Cork

Dressed in a navy pin-striped suit, his right arm propped on the wooden ledge and his stocky frame angled towards the microphone, Ian Bailey spent the closing part of the day talking the court through his early years and the background to his arrival in Ireland.

Born in Manchester 57 years ago, Bailey grew up in Stockport, where his father worked as a craft butcher.

His parents were hard-working people, he told his barrister, Martin Giblin SC.

When he was nine years old, the family moved south to Gloucester, where Bailey attended a religious school called The Crypt, and it was there, aged 14, that he first read All the President's Men, the account of the Watergate affair by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. It kindled a lifelong interest in journalism.

“I thought, that’s what I want to do,” Bailey said. He also liked archaeology, which he felt had a lot in common with investigative journalism. “[With both] you’re trying to discover things,” he said. He started submitting articles on school happenings (a bee attack, rugby matches) to a local newspaper and – after a stint working at a fish stall in Gloucester market – his first job was a traineeship at a local news agency.

In 1979-80, after completing a journalism course in Wales, Bailey moved to Cheltenham, where he became a correspondent for a number of newspapers. Cheltenham was the base of GCHQ, the agency “responsible for international eavesdropping on behalf of the British and the Americans,” and a spy scandal during his time there gave him a lot of work.

For a time he was seconded as a freelance member of the Sunday Times Insight investigations team. He also wrote more "frivolous" stories for the tabloids. "I did well. I was always very busy," he told the court. Bailey married a fellow journalist in 1979 but the relationship ended after four years.

Affection for Ireland

Much of Bailey’s social circle in England in these years comprised first- or second-generation Irish people and he felt affection for the country.

"Shaw said that the English language is wasted on the English. I tended to agree with him," he said. His first visit to west Cork was in 1986, when he came to write an article – subsequently published under the headline "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" – and came away "enchanted" by the area.

Growing a little disillusioned with journalism, Bailey decided he wanted “a different life”. He moved first to Waterford, where he had friends who ran a farm near Kilmacthomas and offered him some summer work. His job was to rise at dawn, take out the shotgun and stop the crows from landing on the barn.

“You were kind of a walking scarecrow,” Giblin said.

"Yes," Bailey replied. He began to write songs, but "they kept coming out as poems", and eventually he produced a collection of verse titled Préachán, the Irish for crow, which is still unpublished.

Fish factory

He left the farm in late 1991 and moved to Schull, in west Cork, where he soon found work as a foreman at a fish factory. It was there that he bumped into

Jules Thomas

, who came to the factory one day looking for some fish. (“She says it was sole I gave her. I maintain it was plaice.”)

“We became friendly, and then we became lovers,” he told the court. From the first row of the public gallery, Ms Thomas looked on.

All the while, Bailey said, his “long-term game plan” was to get back into journalism, but he felt he had a lot to learn about Ireland, its language and its politics. In 1993, through a community employment project, he began writing for a magazine published by Earthwatch, an environmental group. He did some gardening and joined some storytelling groups in the locality.

He also met Claire Wilkinson, an actress and charity fundraiser, and together they wrote a film script that received some State funding thanks to Bailey's approach to Michael D Higgins when the then minister for the arts was on a visit to the area.

The film was screened in autumn 1995 – just over a year before the murder of French film-maker Sophie Toscan du Plantier would send Bailey into what his barrister told the court was an 18-year "nightmare".

Bailey will resume his evidence this morning.