‘Rotten, stinking lies about me have made my life almost impossible’

IAN Bailey spoke out yesterday about “the dirty, rotten, stinking lies” that were printed about him that damaged him 10 years ago and are still damaging him.

Before commencing cross-examination, Mr Bailey made several general comments on the effect that the newspaper articles complained of had on him.

“I haven’t been able to get any work.

“I am completely stymied in that. Now survival — getting here today — is very difficult. Sometimes words fail me. They shouldn’t, I am a wordsmith, a journalist, but it has been torture,” he said.

His senior counsel Tom Creed asked him why he did not leave West Cork.

“That is often asked. My view always was and still is, I was never going to run away.

“Neither was this going to go away. I was always going to have to deal with this. It was something that had to be dealt with.

“My being here is part of this process of dealing with it. People are pointing the finger at me because of articles like this.

“This seems to go to the whole basis of the situation I found myself in when I was arrested. I know evidence was falsified. She (one of the journalists) refers to ‘my unproven innocence’.

“In our law we have a presumption of innocence. I have had that right removed from me by this series of articles. I am trying to prove the negative, it is almost an impossibility. How did this situation occur?”

Mr Bailey, 50, lost his libel action against The Daily Telegraph, Times (and Sunday Times) Irish Sunday Independent, Independent on Sunday and The Star, three years ago, and yesterday was the third day of his appeal to the High Court, where Mr Justice Brian McGovern is presiding at Courtroom Four in the Washington Street courthouse in Cork.

His reference to “stinking lies” was specifically aimed at two articles written by Brighid McLaughlin in the Sunday Independent and the English Independent on Sunday, the latter carrying the headline, “A Devil in the Hills”.

“It looks to me that this reference to a ‘Devil in the Hills’ is a direct reference to me. That is one of the dirty, rotten, stinking lies printed here.

“ I found it damaging then. It still is damaging.”

He rejected her account of being in fear of him and said that she spent four days in the company of himself and his partner, Jules Thomas, and that he drove her around West Cork, and she paid him IR£40 for this, and that he felt she was sympathetic to them.

He said that if she was afraid she could have left at any time. When he read the eventual articles he felt betrayed by the journalist and that he had walked into a trap. He felt that conversations they had were off the record, apart from one brief statement of his innocence, and that the article was to have been a colour piece.

“She took ordinary little things and put a spin on them and makes them odd, it makes them sound sinister,” he said.

A local quoted as saying that Mr Bailey tortured them with his poetry was picked up by the plaintiff as another line used to denigrate him. “My poetry has been generally very well received,” he said. Commenting generally on the articles he said: “They have made my life, ranging from extremely difficult to almost impossible. It has been the most excruciating and awful experience.” Mr Creed SC asked, “How has life been in Schull?”

“For the first five years, almost impossible. I tried to carry on normally in my life but there was no normality.

“After the last libel case three years ago there were incidents off vigilantism, assaults on the property, that were very difficult to deal with. It has created a schism in the community.

“That schism is there to this day,” he said.