In the words of Sinéad O’Connor, he was intimidating, chilling and his sweet-old-gent persona gave way to a brooding, angry giant
IT may not sound very Christian, but I shed no tears for Ian Bailey. He and his overbearing personality made my skin crawl. On hearing about his death, my gut reaction was ‘good riddance’, even though it probably means the end of Sophie’s family’s hopes for closure and justice.
For 26 years, the towering six-footer with an attitude of boorish arrogance, who cultivated an air of eccentricity to attract attention, cast a shadow over public life.
Since December 1996, when Sophie Toscan du Plantier was bludgeoned to death outside her home in West Cork, his name has been to my mind a byword for male violence against women and the law’s laggardness in bringing culprits to justice.
Du Plantier, a 39-year-old film producer, enjoyed a cosmopolitan existence where she never came to any harm – until, on a lonely night in midwinter, an evil creep decided that the Frenchwoman, an outsider living alone and with no real connections to Schull, was his for the taking and savagely beat her to death with a rock. Save for the trial of Bailey in absentia for her murder in Paris, more of which later, he has dominated the narrative since that night and pushed Sophie to the sidelines of her own story, while his infamy grew relentlessly.
THE effect of that barbaric murder cannot be overstated. Like the brutal killing of Ashling Murphy, it sent a tidal wave of fear through the country, reminding women that their safety in the world was fragile and often at the whim of men.
Sophie’s arresting beauty, and her death in the magnificent wilderness of West Cork, added to Bailey’s moth-to-the-flame attraction for publicity, helped the case become a cause célèbre, often eclipsing other female victims of violent crime.
The seductive intrigue of the perfect crime helped to create a mini industry around the case. It is the focus of six books, a Sky TV special by acclaimed director Jim Sheridan, a Netflix series, several documentaries and of the gripping podcast, West Cork. Doubtless his death will ignite a frantic round of activity.
Right from the beginning, the finger of suspicion was thrust at Ian Bailey, thanks to his crass, attention-seeking and megalomaniacal behaviour. He insinuated himself into Sophie’s murder from the outset, attending the crime scene before calling newspaper editors, offering to cover the harrowing case for them. On his podcast, he admitted to making a joke to a Dublin news editor when they raised questions about his rumoured links to the case, which badly backfired.
‘I mistakenly and rather jokingly said “oh yes, it was me – I needed the story.” What I didn’t know was that the news editor had an irony bypass and didn’t get it at all. This was subsequently referred to as an informal admission – (that is) complete nonsense. The suggestion that I had anything to do with it was ridiculous, and I made light of it by way of dark humour. It was a mistake and I regret it.’
Bailey made hay as he hailed himself the ‘chief suspect for her
murder’ while insisting he was framed by xenophobic gardaí.
He kept himself in the public eye by taking to the courts on several occasions with libel cases or fighting extradition attempts.
He was twice arrested but never charged. The only evidence against him was circumstantial, prompting the then-DPP Eamon Barnes to say that the garda investigation was ‘thoroughly flawed and prejudiced’ against the Englishman. He had his defenders, those who feel that his life was ruined by the case, like filmmaker Jim Sheridan – who is convinced that he didn’t do it and who is keen to make another movie about the murder. The law says innocent until proven guilty. Yet the court of public opinion may feel otherwise, particularly in west Cork, where Bailey was a familiar and sometimes menacing figures at markets and arts events, where his tweets about avoiding ‘Froggies’ at the market didn’t always go down well in the tightly knit community.
Likewise, Sophie’s family – who have never abandoned their search for justice and had the bittersweet experience of seeing Bailey convicted for her killing in a French court in May 2019 – a trial which he, true to form, decried as a ‘showtrial’ and a ‘travesty of justice’. Revelations from Jules Thomas about the domestic violence she suffered at the hands of her partner confirmed Bailey as a hothead and a nasty piece of work, particularly when under the influence of alcohol.
Although Thomas is convinced of his innocence in Sophie’s murder, saying that he denied even knowing the Frenchwoman, she said that he lost his rag when drinking and his entire personality changed. ‘He didn’t have an on-off button when drinking,’ she says.
In the court of public opinion, it may merely be a feeling, a hunch, the conviction that there is just something ‘off’ about Bailey that condemns him. Over the years, his behaviour often seemed provocative, designed somehow to bait the public rather than win its regard. It was if he enjoyed making people uncomfortable by his strange behaviour.
The late Sinéad O’Connor, who interviewed him, found his phone manner intimidating and chilling. As he got drunk during the course of their interview his ‘sweet old gentleman’ persona vanished to be replaced by a ‘brooding, angry giant’, she wrote.
For his supporters, the incompetence of the original investigation team, from the late arrival to the scene of the crime of the state pathologist, to the mindboggling number of mishaps and pieces of missing evidence stands in his favour, helping to explain why his fate was sealed as the chief suspect. The GSOC report in 2018 concluded that the investigation was a dog’s dinner, with exhibits like garden gates to 139 witness statements going unaccountably walkabout from garda stations.
But for his detractors, the litany of mistakes proves nothing. The only thing that can be said with any certainty about Bailey is that he never stopped leveraging Sophie’s awful death for his own opportunistic ends.
Without the shroud of suspicion being foisted on him, anointing him with a dubious celebrity, his efforts to become a poet or a podcaster would be unheard of. He would have stayed a nobody, never figuring in the national conversation or becoming a symbol of depending on your viewpoint, justice denied or a miscarriage of justice. He would have been just another crusty hippie haunting the west Cork countryside, posing as an artist to impress the natives while surviving on welfare.
SOPHIE’S murder gave him a platform to show off. On one hand, he could protest his innocence, call for inquiries into the murder and for the chance for him to clear his name. On the other, he could attend poetry readings, write his verse and launch his podcast Ian Bailey In His Own Words.
All the while he was dancing on Sophie’s grave. Even last year, he was capitalising on his infamy and working his brand; he joined Tik Tok and started flogging T-shirts with an image of himself for €20 each on his Facebook page.
At Christmas, he was casting doubt over the garda cold case investigation into Sophie’s murder. The pain that his antics caused Du Plantier’s family never gave him pause, although he often declared his sympathy for them. After he was sentenced by the French courts, he gave an interview to the Mail. ‘Ian Bailey reclined in his garden smoking a cheroot and regaled me with his grandiose plans for the future’, the piece ran. ‘He was about to publish a book of poems he said and a filmmaker was making a documentary about his life. Oh yes, and he had acquired an old Irish drum and was fitting it with a new skin’. He even had the neck to compare himself to John Wayne who was always ‘calm in the eye of the hurricane’. Had Bailey kept his head down during his travails and enjoyed a low-key lifestyle while reclaiming his anonymity, his protests of innocence might be more convincing. But right until the end he was incorrigible.
Sophie died on the lonely boreen beyond Schull so many years ago, and then over a stretch of 26 years, every time he howled at the moon while she lay silent in her grave, Ian Bailey killed her again.