What is it about Ian Bailey?

A closer look at the enigma that was Ian Kenneth Bailey, BCL, LLB, LLM (UCC)

Ian Bailey left England a bitter man. His marriage and career had not fulfilled his hopes. Most people facing a setback will take some time to reflect, pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and try again. It might take months, perhaps a year or two, depending on the scale of the setback. But some people do not do that. Freed of any emotional attachments or a job, they travel abroad. They’re not necessarily sure if they will stay abroad. Perhaps they are thinking only of a month or two, perhaps a year. Perhaps they decide to take it one week at a time. If they miss England, or their family members, they will return. Some people just don’t miss enough things, deeply enough, to bother to come back.

There was a time in 2007 when Ian Bailey returned to London, rented a flat, and possibly considered remaining there. But whatever had led him to flee to West Cork reared its head again. Impossible to know if the primary force was to push him away from London to another place, any place, else. Or perhaps there was something comforting about West Cork, pulling him in, despite the public opinion of him, that he did not feel in England. It was at this point that he might have made the mature, pragmatic decision that he would return to Ireland, yes, but not within a hundred miles of Schull.

Instead, Ian Bailey, full of bitterness and bravado, resolved to return to Jules Thomas and come out fighting. Perhaps he assumed that Jules would not leave her neighbourhood, so to settle elsewhere in Ireland would mean doing so without Jules and the comfortable lifestyle she could provide for him. This line of thinking feels more accurate than any romantic logic based on love for Jules. At this point, they were already drifting apart under the constant pressure of public opinion. Perhaps that is why he went back to London. One of the common themes in Ian’s life is that he always took the easy route.

Sometimes a route that looked easy, such as milking the entire Irish national newspaper industry for millions of pounds, turned out to be very difficult indeed. The papers had only ever referred to him as the “chief suspect” or words to the same effect, never “the notorious murderer”. Just as with Bailey’s own sense of sarcastic humour, it was clear that those reading the newspapers were to consider him the killer, but nothing in the text itself ever said so. It could also be said that nobody did more than Ian Bailey to damage his own reputation in the court of public opinion.

Ian Bailey at the time of the murder

Jim Sheridan was wrong about Bailey’s sense of humour being a signifier of the English upper class. It is also a northern working class English sense of humour, and Bailey was born near Manchester. It is the sense of humour I grew up in the middle of. A genuine, sincere form of greeting might begin: “Alright you old bugger?” or far harsher words in the same direction. The problem with this style of humour that Sheridan was absolutely right about is that you cannot print it. It is audible humour that exists only in the tone of voice, a glance at the right moment, a twinkle in the eye. It looks very bad, and even incriminating, in newsprint. It’s a form of sarcasm, but not a nasty or mean sarcasm. It is supposed to be a gentle, kind sarcasm. In a group where everyone understands this style of humour it can be genuinely roll around on the floor hilarious. It is difficult to imagine how a Cork local might perceive this kind of humour, and no surprise that all who heard it took a dim view, especially when mixed with alcohol and bitterness. It is impossible to imagine describing this concept to a grief-stricken French person.

No normal person would ever use this type of humour when discussing a horrific murder. Only a lunatic would use it in a scenario where the police suspect them of carrying out the crime. It is easy to imagine it being used by a very drunk individual, twisted with bitterness and resentment at being framed for a murder he didn’t commit. Such a person, addled by drink, might even consider that, confident in his supreme innocence, a fair and just legal system would never find him guilty, no matter how much he talked about the case or joked that in fact he was the perpetrator. In fact, that is what happened.

The Irish legal system saw through all the bravado and sarcastic bitter humour and deemed Ian Bailey, not innocent, nothing so final as that, but not a worthy suspect. No matter how many irrelevant coincidences you cobble together, the sum total of a hundred hearsay statements does not correspond to a single fingerprint, a strand of hair or a small drop of the killer’s blood. There is no equation in which a single piece of good, careful, thorough, scientific forensic evidence can be substituted by a hundred people who have a heartfelt belief in the identity of a killer. Especially if none of those hundred people were an eye witness to the crime. No eye witness has ever come forward, most probably (although not certainly) because of the remote location of the attack. We cannot even be sure it was fully dark, but everyone agrees it was fully remote. Only two people were within earshot, Alfie Lyons and Shirley Foster, but they were wrapped up in bed with the windows closed.

Ian Bailey was a narcissist who protested his innocence too frequently, at the slightest provocation. It suited him to play a martyr. It’s easy to imagine a two-line conversation in a Schull supermarket:-

Local person: Nice spring day, Ian, isn’t it?

Ian Bailey: I’ve always been very clear that I didn’t hurt the French lady.

The truth is that Ian Bailey’s journalistic career wasn’t going anywhere until the murder happened on his doorstep. He seemed to spring into life researching the case and for a few short weeks it must have felt like he was finally going to fulfill the potential he had demonstrated in England. He must have been pinching himself at his good luck, finally. Perhaps it was undeserved, perhaps he had been a little bit lazy now and again, but who isn’t? This story, this case, represented deliverance. He could finally stand on his own two feet and pay his way with Jules. Yes, it was an appalling crime, but that is not something that would have bothered Ian Bailey for long.

The primary, overriding and all-possessing point was that Ian had an internationally important story on his own doorstep, and he was going to exploit every possible angle on that story for as long as he possibly could. This had happened before in England, the story about a Russian spy, and he knew how to profit. It seems by all accounts he was transformed into the hardest working journalist in southern Ireland, running rings around full-time seasoned professionals. He came up with such stuff that they became jealous. He was so good, they began to think, as the police did, that the only way he could have found some of these details was if he had actually carried out the murder himself, a leap of logic that sounds ridiculous now. Especially as it seems that some of his most fanciful revelations were either made up or logical guesses.

Ian became a full-time investigator overnight. Knowing what we do about his obsessive traits, he most likely worked 7 days a week, and probably 18 hours a day. It is difficult to fully imagine the reverse that he must have felt after that first arrest. The shock would have been devastating. There might have been a short time, perhaps a few weeks afterwards, in his most optimistic moments, when he thought being arrested might actually help him get even more inside scoops. But gradually the truth would be too obvious to hide from: his story, the major career breakthrough, the good luck, had been snatched away from him.

His eccentric personality and episodes of domestic violence plus his proximity to the crime scene made him the perfect patsy. All the things that had made this a lucky break for a freelance journalist suddenly made him a suspect. And from that day, Ian’s career prospects and mental health simply collapsed. Other writers noticed how much older he looked when, a few years later, they all reconvened to watch his libel action against the Irish press, the very hand that he thought would feed him for years to come. Had he not become the chief suspect, he might have written the best book about the case. His contribution to the recent documentaries and podcasts would have been completely different. No longer the slurring village idiot, but Ian Bailey the genuine article, the respected talking head, the first journalist on the scene.

It is surely fanciful to ask this but if Ian could have found a way to stay off the drink and pursue this case as relentlessly as he did before the first arrest, is there any possibility that he might have cracked the case himself? Instead he spent the last 28 years of his life lamenting bitterly that the world was rigged against him.

Time for another poll, this time with Alfie Lyons added in.