Murder in West Cork
/They are building a bonfire in Paris,
Built on a rotten pile of lies...
– Ian Bailey, 'Bonfire'
Like a real-life Jack Reacher (fictional hero of the series of thrillers by Lee Child), Ian Bailey was a six-foot-five drifter who turned up in the middle of nowhere and found himself framed by the local cops and a posse of local bumpkins. But why?
Nearly three decades after the brutal crime on Ireland’s Mizen Peninsula, the true story of what happened on a frosty night in 1996 remains shrouded in mystery and intrigue. Netflix and Sky have both produced films on the saga. The latter was made by Oscar-winning director Jim Sheridan with the blessing of Bailey and his former partner, Jules Thomas. It makes full use of the peninsula’s haunting beauty and could double-up as an ad for Tourism Ireland. There has also been a plethora of books, podcasts, and newspaper articles on the topic.
Bailey’s sudden death from a heart attack in a Bandon town public street on Sunday, January 12, 2024, triggered a another round of speculation.
Bailey was the self-admitted “chief suspect” for the murder of French film-maker Sophie Toscan du Plantier, and had spent the past twenty-seven years trying to clear his name, fighting the media which resembled a Lernaean Hydra, police in two countries, the French judiciary (who, on failing to extradite him, tried and convicted him in absentia), and local gossip in his adopted West Cork community.
Such is the power of the vitriol heaped on the Englishman that just a handful of locals dared to express their sorrow at his death.
Hairdresser Grainne Kollins, who had appeared in two Tik Tok clips with Bailey just a month before, Christmas 2023, posted on her Facebook page “RIP to my buddy Ian Bailey,” but the clip was later removed from her public page.
Shopkeeper Kathleen Thornhill told the Irish Times she had helped him across the road just a week or so before his death after he had come into her electrical shop to buy an electric blanket. He had been so frail, he couldn’t even balance on his walking stick, she had said.
Ian Bailey
Other locals quoted in the press used a range of insulting terms to describe him: “Arrogant,” “Tooty, snooty,” “a huge ego,” and “You wouldn’t trust him as far as you could throw him,” were among the comments made to the Irish Times and other newspapers.
The comments were in keeping with the pattern of abuse heaped on Bailey over the past three decades. Even the Catholic Church failed to protect this man from a modern version of a public stoning. In 2019, Toscan du Plantier’s son, Pierre-Louis Baudey-Vignaud, travelled to West Cork to make a public appeal for local witnesses to travel to Paris for the upcoming trial in absentia. Speaking from the pulpit of the local church in Goleen, he said: “In a few days’ time, the trial of the man accused of killing my mother will begin at last,” and went on to make comments which Bailey’s solicitor, Frank Buttimer, described as “defamatory.” Baudey-Vignaud confirmed to the Irish Times that he had not shown the local priest the script of what he was about to say, but Mr. Buttimer was furious at the church authorities for allowing the French man to “berate an individual from the pulpit” at Sunday Mass and effectively declare his client “a guilty man in front of Mass-goers.”
If the French lit a bonfire, the Irish media incited a public stoning of their former colleague. For thirty years, Bailey had to endure physical assaults in the street by randomers. The hatred was passed down through the generations; as recently as last year, young people were asking him to pose for selfies – then punching him. People of all ages spat at him. Still more muttered “murderer” or hid behind avatars and fake names on social media, where they played armchair judge, jury and executioner. The most cowardly of all waited until he was dead to publicly condemn him.
The headlines were even more scathing: “Ian Bailey was cremated alone because nobody in Ireland respected him,” screeched the Irish Daily Mirror, quoting Mme du Plantier’s uncle, Jean-Pierre Gazeau, who remains convinced that Bailey murdered his niece. “Ian Bailey was a ‘parasite’ on women and beautiful Sophie’s murder gave him fame,” proclaimed Evoke magazine. “Ian Bailey lived in ‘absolute tip’ and was surrounded by bizarre items at rented Cork home in months before he died,” sneered the Irish Sun. “There is probably a sigh of relief communally,” declared the afore-mentioned Irish Times, quoting the neighbours again.
Lurid articles went into great details about the contents of Ian Bailey’s diaries and scribblings, which were allegedly found in the Garda raid on his flat six days after he died. Under the headline “Ian Bailey ‘totally obsessed by sex,’” The Irish Sun wrote about “sexual conquests & redemption in bizarre private diary cops seized.” Cork Beo, a local website under the Mirror umbrella, also went into great detail about these diaries in “Ian Bailey wrote about wild fantasies and abuse in diaries seized by gardai.”[i]
It is frankly incredible that detectives would find the time to transcribe diaries and random scribblings going back thirty years, and pass them on to journalists; I reckon they were about as reliable as the “evidence,” rumours and local gossip. There is also the legitimate concern that real evidence might go “missing” again, as it did back in 1996 when the gardai “lost” a five-bar gate from the scene of the crime.
Some journalists made it personal. “‘This is it, I thought. He’s going to kill me’ – my four days in Schull with Ian Bailey” was the bold statement over a piece in the Irish Independent written by a female journalist, alongside a photo of her with Bailey from thirty-odd years ago. In the accompanying article, she claimed Bailey told her “You look like Sophie” and drove her at breakneck speed up a hill to point out the murder scene. Maybe the woman really was terrified of him, but nothing happened, and he was remarkably non-violent for the last thirty years of his colourful life.
The media who painted Bailey as a loser bear some responsibility for his failure to make a living. The man certainly tried to revive his old career as a journalist. Little did he know that his efforts were being undermined behind his back. “I refused to let our female reporters interact with Bailey,” was the headline in the local newspaper the Southern Star, in which a female editor primly and proudly confided her reasons for fobbing off Bailey whenever he would come looking for work: “His only contact with this newspaper was a male reporter who very quickly had the ‘measure’ of him. We also refused to report on the myriad utterances he made in recent years, which became tabloid fodder. Bailey sells newspapers, for sure, but I refused to give oxygen to his inane ramblings about his ‘innocence’, or his podcast, or his theories on alleged assaults by unidentified attackers. If he was appearing in court, that was news, but anything less was only pandering to his obvious narcissism...”
There was nothing new in any of this, of course. In 2021, shortly after Bailey’s relationship with his long-time romantic partner ended, singer Sinead O’Connor (yes, she who was ridiculed by the Irish media during her life but beatified in death) wrote a piece for the Sunday Independent in which she bragged of having set a “test” for Bailey to see if he would react with characteristic arrogance. “I text him to say that if either of us goes off on tangents tomorrow, I’ll keep pulling us back to focus. I want to see how he reacts to my expressed intention to be in control of the conversation...” The interview itself could best be described as baiting: “When I ask him if he thinks he could do with some help when it comes to behaving believably, he angrily tells me he doesn’t feel any need to have his name cleared, despite his advancing years, nor to adapt his maladaptive behaviour, nor to focus on finding out who the real killer is.”
In a remarkable display of mass-abandonment of journalistic ethics, many journalists justified their irrational conviction by pointing out that Bailey had been arrested for assaulting his partner, Jules Thomas, nearly thirty years ago. Their bizarre logic being that a man who had been violent towards someone he lived with could be automatically assumed to have committed a motiveless crime towards a stranger, and that, even if he hadn’t committed murder, he was a “scumbag” and therefore deserved not to be forgiven, no matter how many times he apologized.
Those who point out that Ian Bailey had a history of domestic violence seem oblivious to the common knowledge that domestic abusers tend to abuse only those close to them.
Long after Ms. Thomas had forgiven him, Bailey continued to plea mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, as numerous journalists returned to the subject. Even his attempt to explain in court was regarded as minimizing the incidents. He told the court Ms. Thomas had “grabbed” him while they were in the car after a boozy night out, and he had “reacted” by pushing her away before attacking her; as a result, she ended up in the hospital, with bruises to her face, head, hands and arms, and needing stiches to her lip. In the last incident, which took place in 2001 while he was wearing a cast on his leg, he beat Ms. Thomas with a crutch after she woke him from a nap; in a previous attack, he attacked her after waking from sleep with a nosebleed, “lashing out.”
Bailey never denied the incidents of violence towards Jules Thomas, though he won a libel action for claims that he had beaten his ex-wife, Sarah Limbrick. Throughout his three decades as the Monster of Mizen, Bailey repeatedly expressed his remorse to journalists who persisted in reminding him of his past violence towards Jules Thomas. But he was never allowed to put it in the past.
Even after she ended their relationship, Jules Thomas maintained he couldn’t have committed murder. Of course, some people put two and two together and got five, but anyone who has met Ms. Thomas could only conclude that this honest, quietly dignified, and decent woman would have grassed her partner to the Garda immediately had she thought he committed murder. Ms. Thomas gave me an impromptu interview at their home in 2011 and struck me as the kind of person who could not help talking – like Ian Bailey.
Another rationale given by journalists for the public crucifixion of Ian Bailey was that he was an “oddball,” “an attention-seeker,” a “noticebox,” and that he had “notions.”
The latter two slurs are familiar to anyone who went to school in Ireland in the 1970s; these comments were used by a certain type of teacher to crush the self-confidence of children who dared to be vibrant. With such a scathing comment, an embittered civil servant could extinguish the spark of creativity and punish the child for daring to think, behave, speak, or look like an individual. It turned extraverts into introverts.
This hatred of anyone who dared to stick their head above the parapet is not exclusive to Ireland; the Australians call it “Tall Poppy Syndrome.” The English, with their class system, don’t quite get it, and Americans, with their culture built on meritocracy, find the concept alien – until they come to Ireland and find their exuberance cruelly dismissed as “brashness.”
Ironically locals who complained of Bailey’s boastfulness never seemed to consider that this man who was an “open book,” naive in his outspokenness, would certainly have owned up.
Those who say he revelled in the notoriety fail to recognize the fact that he could have done so more comfortably from an Irish prison; he could have served his time, and walked free instead of spending the rest of his life in the open prison of his West Cork community. With no money, no prospects of earning an income – his journalism career was in tatters – and the threat of extradition to France hanging over him should he leave Ireland, he was trapped.
Doubly ironic is the fact that, when the harassed Bailey responded to the public smear campaign with black humour, his Irish tormentors suddenly forgot their own love of irony. “It was me! I did it – I killed her! I did it to resurrect my career!” he told his former news editor in one of several outbursts. The ensuing chorus is reminiscent of a scene in the iconoclastic British film The Life of Brian, in which a man is repeatedly stoned for uttering the name “Jehovah” (“Look, I had a lovely supper, and all I said to my wife was that that piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah.”)
Even Bailey’s efforts to move on with his life were blocked by the baying mob. For three decades, he sold home-made chutney and pizza at a market stall in Schull, and flogged his self-published poetry books as a sideline. But the other market traders were deeply unhappy about his presence in their midst and told journalists they seized the opportunity to oust him from the market once his relationship with Ms. Thomas ended (she was a founder stall-holder).
Of course, Bailey could have refused to talk to the reporters, but he gave interviews freely, naively assuming that speaking to the press gave him a chance to clear his name or at least put his side of the story, to counteract the barrage of French-led condemnations. He also took to TikTok, where he gained some followers among the younger generation, but this only earned him more notoriety.
He often bitterly complained about the fact that many journalists and film makers were making a “killing” (his pun) out of his notoriety, while he remained a pauper, dependant on social welfare. While Netflix, Sky, etc. were entitled to report on a matter of public interest, the constant vilifying of Ian Bailey reminded me of terriers tormenting a badger; no matter how courageously he fought back, he was always going to lose. And even though his poems, which he self-published and recited at open mics in local pubs, focused as much on other people as himself, he was frequently accused of “grandstanding.”
But still, why? Why was this man framed and then vilified?
Anyone familiar enough with the Irish psyche, but detached enough to analyze it, will have noticed that much of the antagonism towards Bailey relates to his combination of sex appeal and Englishness. While the murder victim, Sophie Toscan du Plantier, looked like she could have been “one of our own” with her light-ginger hair and pale, freckly skin (it’s easy to picture Saoirse Ronan playing her in a movie adaptation), Bailey ticked all the wrong boxes in an Ireland that still suffers from post-Colonial hang-ups. A hundred years after the country broke free of the British, the “auld enemy” is supposed to be a chinless wonder with a straggly beard and a timid demeanour – not a six-foot-five ex-rugby player with a booming voice and the dark good looks of an old-fashioned Hollywood star. I am not the only journalist to notice his “Heathcliffian” appearance; most recently the Irish crime writer Ralph Riegel (one of the few to report objectively on this whole saga) remarked on Newstalk Radio that Bailey looked and sounded as if he could have played a Shakespearean lead. Back in 2011 when I reported on an aspect of the story, I mentioned Bailey’s rugged handsomeness to a local guesthouse owner, and was amused to see her blush, while her husband frowned.
A male shopkeeper remarked: “He used to walk in here like he owned the place!” Bailey certainly had a swagger.
He was too macho to fit the mould of arty hippy types who settle in West Cork. And he wasn’t the kind to join the Tidy Towns committee or take up golf. He had no kids (parenthood makes even the most objectionable people pillars of the community).
His flamboyant dress style should have helped him blend in, but, coupled with the aforementioned good looks and Englishness, it only added to his image as the bête noire of this bohemian corner of Ireland.
He lately took to wearing a Palestinian style keffiyeh over one of his immaculate overcoats (Bailey was always a snappy dresser, even when he lived in squalour). Maybe the media, which speaks out of both sides of its mouth on the topic of the Palestinian genocide found him hard to place on the rigid Left-Right spectrum: Bailey was too good-looking (in his prime, anyway), smartly dressed and macho to be a Leftie – yet he was also a hippy poet who wrote about the plight of the Palestinians long before it became fashionable.
Even his attempts to indulge in the age-old English ex-pat activity of “going native” were not enough to appease the hostile diehards. Bailey peppered his conversation and poetry with Irish phrases, which, had he been of any other nationality, would have endeared him to the Irish. Instead, his attempts at speaking Gaelic were met with sneers. This attitude was not confined to a few rustic IRA sympathizers; Bailey had been dead less than a week when a “journalist” in the “newspaper of record,” The Irish Times, commented on his “pidgin Irish.”
Self-deprecation fell flat too. In the notes he published with a poem about an elderly neighbour who died, Bailey commented that his own body was also submitting to the inevitable decline brought on by the ageing process. The newspapers reported with glee on the decline in his good looks, as a lifetime of hard drinking, smoking and stress took its toll.
One of his few friends, local solicitor (lawyer) Ray Hennessy said he was remarkably resilient. “I thought he remained pretty strong for what he had endured,” Mr. Hennessy remarked to the Irish Examiner. “I think the whole country had him convicted and I was one of the few people who believed he was innocent.”
Cork city solicitor Frank Buttimer, who represented Bailey pro bono for three decades, said he had no doubt that Bailey’s health was “destroyed” by “a conspiracy to link him to a crime he did not commit.” Bailey “suffered a deep and grievous wrong at the hands of the Irish state,” Mr. Buttimer told the Guardian newspaper. “It shaped his life for the past 27 years. It took any form of normal existence away from him. He became extraordinary because of what happened to him.”
Buttimer has always maintained that it was implausible for Bailey to murder a stranger, and most, if not all, lawyers in Ireland would agree with him, including two successive Directors of Public Prosecution who refused to permit the French to extradite him to France…
[…] This is just an excerpt from the March 2024 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!
Articles:
Culture of Death Watch
Murder in West Cork by Geraldine Comiskey
Features
The Triumph of Walter Lüftl by John Beaumont
The Ethnic Cleansing of German Minorities after the War by Dr. E. Michael Jones
Reviews
Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy by Sean Naughton
(Endnotes Available by Request)
[1] John Kierans, “Ian Bailey wrote about wild fantasies and abuse in diaries seized by gardai,” CorkBeo, Jan. 29, 2024, https://www.corkbeo.ie/news/local-news/ian-bailey-wrote-wild-fantasies-28528719
[2] Molli Mitchell, “Sophie Toscan du Plantier Husband: Who Is Daniel Toscan du Plantier and What Happened to Him?” Newsweek, June 30, 2021, https://www.newsweek.com/sophie-toscan-du-plantier-husband-daniel-death-murder-west-cork-netflix-1605569
[3] Mitchell, “
