Irish Examiner view: The stuff of a Le Carré spy novel

Humanitarian aid worker Sean Binder faces absurd charges, including espionage

Sean Binder outside the court of Mytilene in the island of Lesbos on Thursday. Picture: Manolis Lagoutaris /AFP via Getty Images

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold is a famous spy novel, penned by the British author John le Carré and published in 1963. It depicts Alec Leamas, an MI5 agent, being sent to East Germany to pose as a defector, in order to gain information about colleagues who had been captured there.

The pity of it is that le Carré died last year, because, as a writer who liked to exemplify the wildly unreasonable characteristics of the Cold War, he would have been perfect to illustrate the absurdity of the espionage charges (among others) that Sean Binder, a humanitarian aid worker from Co Kerry, is facing.