Man with socialisation difficulties or a cold-blooded criminal?

The Supreme Court’s decision to allow the extradition of Eric Eoin Marques to the US this week ended a five- and-a-half year battle by the Dubliner to be allowed to face justice at home. But while those five and a half years have opened up many nooks and crannies in the country’s extradition laws and procedures to scrutiny, the protracted process has shed little light on the man at the centre of the saga.

Marques, now aged 33, is facing charges in the US of involvement in a massive international network of buyers, sellers and distributors of child pornography. The allegation is that he provided the online technology — the web hosting space — for websites offering the most vile child abuse imagery, enabling them to operate under the radar in the unregulated darknet and making him, as the court heard, “the largest facilitator of child porn on the planet”.