Witness: I got cash to befriend Bailey

A man has told the High Court gardai gave him cash “a few quid — 20 bucks here, 40 bucks there”, clothes and significant quantities of cannabis to befriend Ian Bailey and “loosen” his tongue.

Martin Graham said he was asked “to befriend Mr Bailey as best I can” and he thought that was ridiculous because he did not know Mr Bailey. He said gardai offered to buy him clothes and “sweeteners” and suggested “the family would be very grateful for a favourable statement, if I could find anything that suggested Mr Bailey was linked with it”.

“I was constantly being pressed by the police to suggest there was a link between Ian Bailey and Sophie Toscan du Plantier but I didn’t know of any, just what they told me. I just thought it was crazy.”

Mr Graham, 53, who came to west Cork in 1996 from England, said he had accepted cash, clothes and cannabis from gardai, including “seven ozs high-quality Lebanese flat press” which he and friends smoked during a music festival.

He said he first encountered a very stressed and upset Mr Bailey in a house belonging to artist Russell Barrett in Skibbereen, sometime after Mr Bailey was first arrested in February 1997.

Gardaí later came to the house, asking him and the other occupants about Mr Bailey’s behaviour and mood. Two gardai introduced themselves as Detectives Jim Fitzgerald and Liam Leahy and he only spoke with them briefly and was concerned not to be seen as “a rat”, he said.

He said he went to the Garda station in Skibbereen a few days later and it was arranged he would meet Detectives Fitzgerald and Leahy at a shrine outside Skibbereen.

He sat into the detectives’ car; they talked and drove around and they later bought him dinner in a pub in Skibbereen, he said.

He never went to a Garda station to make a statement and the gardai did not seem to be writing down anything at all, he said. He believed he met them two days later when they showed him the murder scene and pointed out Ms Toscan du Plantier’s property, sad what Mr Bailey was supposed to have said about it.

Mr Graham said, at the suggestion of Det Fitzgerald, the gardai later picked him up and drove him to near Mr Bailey’s house outside Schull. He had walked round to the house but Mr Bailey turned him away. He said he went back to the gardai and told them Mr Bailey was “stressed” and needed to “chill out” and have “a good smoke”. He said Det Fitzgerald asked: “Can you get some, Martin?” and, when he said no, Det Fitzgerald said: “What if we could get you some, Martin?”

Mr Graham said he took from that he was “going to get me cannabis to loosen Mr Bailey’s tongue”.

He said gardai later picked him up to go to a music festival at Kilcrohane where Mr Bailey was due to go. He said the gardai gave him cannabis in a police evidence bag.

“It was ridiculous, I was asked to go to Kilcrohane and go into a pub and start talking about murder when everyone else was going ‘diddly dee’,” he said. He said he made eye contact at the festival with Mr Bailey and maybe said ‘hi’ but that was his only contact.

The gardai were “disappointed but not disheartened” and were prepared “for another crack”, he said. He and his friends had used the cannabis at Kilcrohane but the gardai indicated they would get more, he said.

Mr Graham will continue his evidence today in the resumed action by Mr Bailey against the Garda Commissioner and State. They deny his claims.