Mick Clifford: We can’t silence those we disagree with — that's not democracy

Increasingly, in the current cultural milieu, there is a tendency to decide that some people must be silenced if their record or their views are deemed unacceptable, writes Mick Clifford

John Gilligan in the documentary 'Confessions of a Crime Boss'. Picture: Virgin Media

Helen McEntee was adamant this week that she would not be watching the TV documentary based on interviews with John Gilligan.

Ms McEntee is the justice minister, while John Gilligan is a career criminal with a reputation for violence and thuggery. He is also widely suspected of having ordered the murder of journalist Veronica Guerin in 1996. He served 17 years in prison for drug offences before being released in 2013.

One might have thought that the minister for justice might find such a programme informative in terms of her brief. She could have watched the first 10 minutes of it and come to the conclusion that it was a load of cobblers in which Gilligan had been given a platform to make all sorts of wild and irrational allegations to distract from his criminality. But instead, she appeared to be making a virtue of her refusal to watch it at all.

“This is a person who has been convicted of very serious drug trafficking crimes and who has inflicted untold misery on people — and I certainly won’t be watching it and I know many people who won’t be either,” she said.

Who is she talking about?

Had she been contacted by members of the public complaining about the airing of the programme? She gave no further details.

The junior minister for drugs, Hildegarde Naughton, took a similar tack.

“Freedom of the press is very important in any democracy but John Gilligan threatened that democracy through his criminal actions,” she said.

“I would hope that any journalist involved in this programme would challenge any assertions he might make. I would not be in favour of banning anyone from the air, but I would question the merit of programmes like this.”

One wonders how these politicians would feel about an interview with Vladamir Putin, who has been responsible for mass murder and the widespread degradation of human beings.

Or any other of a raft of notorious individuals who are generally reviled and feared.

Is it the case that we should now never hear from anybody who is repulsive, irrespective of what they have to say?

Donald Trump has all the appearance of a man who was, if not continues to be, determined to usurp the basic tenets of democracy, a move that would inevitably have a huge impact on areas such as civil and human rights.

There was some debate last May when CNN organised a townhall style interview with Trump. Should he be given airtime? In the end, the TV station decided to go with it and Trump repeated all his usual bluster and lies but it would arguably have been far worse to refuse to hear from him, particularly as huge numbers of Americans intend to vote for him.

One of the best books published this year was Mark O’Connell’s A Thread Of Violence. In it, O’Connell attempted to divine the motives and emotional and psychological hinterland that propelled Malcolm McArthur to separately murder two people, Bridie Gargan and Derek Dunne, in 1982.

The killings were vicious and unprovoked. McArthur was a formerly wealthy, bookish socialite whose coffers were thinning out and the murders were apparently part of an attempt to rob money.

O’Connell set out to explore how this could have happened. He searched for McArthur, who was released from prison in 2012, literally by walking the streets of Dublin during the pandemic.

He gained McArthur’s confidence and conducted a number of meetings with him on which the book centres.

What emerges is a fascinating cerebral study of a man who could commit such a human outrage.

The families of the two murder victims declined to speak to the author, which is entirely understandable.

From this vantage, it seems obvious that McEntee and Naughton came out strongly against the Gilligan interview on the basis that Veronica Guerin’s brother, Jimmy, expressed strident opposition to the “platforming” of Gilligan, as he put it.

Jimmy Guerin is entitled to his outrage. He has been a loyal and vigilant keeper of his sister’s flame. He says he was approached to participate in the programme but declined.

Notwithstanding the moral rectitude of his stance, any decision to broadcast what Gilligan has to say should not be his and his alone. Yet government ministers, largely on the basis of his opposition, quite obviously decided that the politically astute thing to do was to dismiss the programme without even viewing it. That is not a good look in a democracy.

There are limits to freedom of speech. One of those limits is the dissemination of hate speech, another is defamation. But, increasingly, in the current cultural milieu, there is a tendency to decide that some people must be silenced if their record or their views are deemed unacceptable. Tolerance in a democracy has to extend beyond those with whom we agree or whose views we feel should not be heard for whatever reason.

As it turns out, the Gilligan documentary is nothing to write home about, certainly the first installment of the scheduled three, broadcast last Monday.

Gilligan comes across as a thug, unrepentant and with no obvious redeeming features. He is pulled up here and there and is totally unconvincing.

That does not infer it was a bad idea to interview him but allotting three hours of airtime based on the interviews appears entirely over the top.

I would have difficulty sitting through a three-hour study of Bob Dylan, Seamus Heaney, or the writer Joan Didion, all of whom have had fascinating lives in which they positively touched millions.

Gilligan has had an impact on plenty of people but only through inflicting violence or living off the drug addictions of others for profit. He is not fascinating.

A half-hour interview would have been more than enough to find out that he is, more or less, exactly as all of us suspected and there is nothing further of value to extract from his opinions and self-serving accounts of his life.

The most interesting aspect of Gilligan’s story to emerge this week was the suspended sentence he received for drugs and firearms offences in Spain, where he now lives. The 71-year-old had been charged in relation to possession of a firearm and for smuggling cannabis from Spain to Ireland.

Prosecutors were initially looking for a six-year prison term but with the mitigation of an early confession, the judge decided that Gilligan would not be committed to prison.

There is much, often uninformed and understandably emotionally charged, comment on alleged lenient sentencing in this country. Everybody is entitled to a second chance, often expressed through the suspension of a prison term. Yet the outcome in the Spanish court appears inexplicable.

Gilligan is long past receiving one more rap on the knuckles and there is not a scintilla of evidence that he can be persuaded to give up crime this late in his life.