Irish Examiner view: Two murders, two contrasting responses, for what reason?

The name Belinda Pereira does not have the same recognition as Sophie Toscan du Plantier, though both were murdered while visiting Ireland in December 1996

Sophie Toscan du Plantier, with her son Pierre-Louis Baudey-Vignaud. Her case has received a considerably more media coverage than that of Belidna Pereira. Picture: Netflix/Sophie: A Murder in West Cork

The name Belinda Pereira does not have the same immediate recognition factor as that of Sophie Toscan du Plantier, although both women were murdered, just six days apart, while visiting Ireland in late December 1996.

As gardaí this week renewed an appeal for information about the murder of Toscan du Plantier to help them solve a decades-old case, it is timely to recall that the murder of Pereira, who died aged 26, has never been solved either.

Yet, at this time of year, it is always the murder of the French film producer in West Cork that continues to make headlines. There are reasons for that.

One of them is that the self-declared chief suspect in the case, Ian Bailey, lives in the area and, as a journalist, has an unseemly knack for generating headlines. 

He was sentenced, in absentia, to 25 years in prison by a French court, but was never extradited. He has also continually professed his innocence.

Those events, along with a series of books and documentaries, have kept the Toscan du Plantier case in the spotlight. And rightly so. When a woman’s life is extinguished, everything must be done to seek justice and to lay bare the lasting grief felt by those left behind.

Yet, where is the renewed appeal for information about the death of Belinda Pereira, the only child of Sri Lankan parents who emigrated to Britain in the 1960s? It is telling in itself that her parents are not named in articles, at least not in any of those easily retrievable.

To be fair, when the gardaí made a renewed appeal in the Pereira case in 2014, they made a point of stressing the enduring pain felt by relatives.

There had been some hope of a breakthrough, as gardaí believed the person who had robbed and subsequently murdered her might have spoken of what had happened.

Six years on, nothing has come of that line of enquiry. Yet, it is still important to remember that the body of this young woman was found in an apartment in Dublin on December 29, 1996, six days after Toscan du Plantier’s body was discovered in Schull, West Cork.

At the time, the newspapers carried a report on the murder of a “Sri Lankan vice girl” alongside a grainy, faded photo of an unrecognisable woman.

Today, we might use a more politically correct term, but it is still deeply problematic to reduce a human being to their nationality and profession.

There has been some progress. In recent years, there has been a very welcome shift away from reporting the graphic nature of these women’s deaths to focus instead on the full lives they lived, as well as the impact on relatives of waiting more than a quarter of a century for justice.

As Women’s Aid suggested in its harrowing report, Femicide Watch: “Efforts should be made to report on the woman’s life and her loss, not just the traumatic and graphic manner of her death. Women and their loved ones should be afforded dignity in the reporting of femicide cases.”

It is a grim fact of life that we even have to report on femicide cases, but when we do, we should report on them all.