On an astonishing clear and bright day in County Donegal, I abandoned a friend with whom I had, if truth be known, looked forward to a leisurely and quite possibly Guinness-fuelled evening, and headed south for County Clare.
It was a Saturday and, since I worked for The Daily Telegraph, theoretically a day off. But the day before, I had written from Belfast about the strange case of the mother, toddler and priest who were missing in the west of Ireland amid fears that they had been abducted.
I expected to have to return to the story, assuming that everyone would turn up safe and sound. But there was no happy ending; the priest's body was found in woodland as I reached my friend's cottage far away outside Ballyshannon and the mystery was now a murder investigation, of interest to The Sunday Telegraph, which naturally counted on me to provide its report.
This I did during a long evening of stop-start driving which got me no nearer my destination than Knock, Co Mayo as I tried to keep up to date with events with calls from phone kiosks. Next morning, I arrived at the entrance to the woods just as it was confirmed that the bodies of the mother and her three-year-old son had also been discovered.
It was, of course, a desperately sad affair. The three victims had been killed by a disturbed young man who was later to die in custody.
Eight years later, the acclaimed Irish author Edna O'Brien published a novel, In the Forest, which was inspired by the triple murder. In a compelling interview in The Observer, written by the consistently excellent Rachel O'Cooke, to mark her 80th birthday, O'Brien talked about the furious reaction her book received in Ireland.
"They're always the worst. They're jealous. I don't think it's anything else. Fintan O'Toole [the Irish Times columnist] said [about In the Forest] that I was morally criminal. Of course, it would have been all right if it was a man who'd written that novel, if I had been Sebastian Barry, or Roddy Doyle, or John Banville. There are still certain no-go areas for women writers."
This prompted an indignant response from O'Toole. I cannot locate online the text of his published letter but it pointed out that the phrase used by him had been "a moral mistake", not morally criminal.
His letter closely followed the reasoning he has previously advanced for his criticism of the novel: "Edna O’Brien’s forthcoming (as it was then) novel will deal with one of the most devastating events of the past 20 years in the Republic: the murder of Imelda Riney, her son Liam and Father Joe Walsh by Brendan O’Donnell in 1994. […/] They were a dreadful catastrophe visited on innocent people by a disturbed, deranged man. They did not and do not have a public meaning ... there is simply no artistic need for so close an intrusion into other people’s grief ... The only reason to do otherwise is to be found in the realm, not of art but of commerce … The explicitness, indeed, is arguably an aesthetic as well as a moral mistake."
O'Toole in entitled to that view and many would probably share it. However, it is worth pointing out that in common with every other Irish newspaper, along with radio and TV, the same Irish Times for which he works gave wall-to-wall coverage of the abductions and killings. My own account, though for an English newspaper, would have been a lot more substantial than appeared had the office lawyer not been so cautious about what we could say, given that O'Donnell was in custody.
Reporting in detail on important occurrences is what newspapers are, in part, for and I find no fault with that. But a newspaper is also a commercial enterprise and however diligently and correctly it chronicles events, it does so in order to be sold, preferably producing a profit for its operating company.
Again, I have no quarrel with that aspect of the newspaper's raison d'être. It is as absurd to denounce journalists, as many do, with the cry "you only do it to sell papers" as it would be to lecture a BMW worker for "only doing it to sell cars" or an estate agent who "only did it to sell houses".
But why, if it perfectly proper for The Irish Times to report extensively on a terrible series of crimes, is it so wrong for a novelist to draw on the same events in her own work several years later?
It may be that O'Brien would have been spared O'Toole's stern disapproval had she used fictitious names instead of - as he, of course, does in his criticism - the real ones.
But isn't that the point?
What that deranged misfit did was, as O'Toole says, one of the most devastating events in recent Irish history. The second of my three Amazon images shows a work of non-fiction about the murders. But even in a fictionalised account, the participating characters would be readily identified, perhaps more readily than a writer would expect.
Without naming anyone, the great Irish troubadour Christy Moore referred to the killings in a song called Tiles and Slabs; he was visibly shocked when, during an interview, I mentioned my knowledge of the case, thus showing I had recognised it had prompted his song.
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