Where murder and mayhem lurk…

Hands up, you're in the South now

As we drove back across the Border at Lenamore, my friend seemed to exhale a sigh of relief. The once-forbidding outer reaches of the Steelstown and Galliagh suburbs of Derry city were a welcoming haven now, he said.

He was joking, of course, but with more than a hint of ironic truth

‘I’ve told friends in the South that I’m getting too nervous to visit them now,’ he said, 'because all I seem to read about is violence and murder.

‘At least when that was happening up here, we sort of saw the reason for it. We could even avoid it and live our lives in relative safety. Down there, it just seems senseless and random and it’s as bad as ever it was up here.'

I decided to keep a tally. Today (12 March), it includes the following:

• A decomposing body – thought to be that of a young man who was murdered last summer – unearthed from a bog in north Kerry;

• A member of a military bomb disposal squad injured while making safe an improvised explosive device (IED) fixed to the underside of a car in Cork;

• A warning by a local politician that the proliferation of knives has led to a wave of seemingly random attacks in Dundalk.

The body from the bog was a chilling reminder of the continuing search for the ‘disappeared’ victims of the Troubles. Combined with the under-car bomb, it harked back to the legacy of a 30-year conflict in Northern Ireland, an era we are still working to put behind us forever.

Gardaí gather at another crime scene

But on my trawl for news of violent crime south of the Border, I could have gone back for the past month and compiled daily incidents of violent crime, a recurring catalogue that matches some of the worst of the Troubles.

It would include the shooting of four men, two of them fatally, near a GAA clubhouse in Kildare; a drive-by shooting in suburban Dublin when stray bullets narrowly missed a group of innocent teenage girls; the discovery of two bodies, both with fatal gunshots, in separate cars in rural Roscommon; and the corpses of two men, both shot, in a burnt-out car dumped in isolated Ravensdale Forest just south of the Border.

It is a chilling reminder of former times, yet such wanton violence seems to have become almost an accepted aspect of life south of the Border. When it was happening up north, there was natural alarm that it could spiral out of control and even infect the south in its mindless mayhem.

Back then, people from Dublin and points south visibly quaked at the prospect of crossing the Border. Truth to be told, some still do.

Yet the fact is that the recorded level of violent crime in Northern Ireland last year was the lowest since the start of 1969. Let me say that again, the violence has dropped to the level it was before the real onset of the Troubles and the start of the IRA campaigns.

That was back in the relatively innocent days when Dublin and all of Ireland was agog at the grisly case of medical student Shan Mohangi convicted of killing his 16-year-old girlfriend in a botched home abortion. That notorious story began in 1963 and rolled on for years. Today, it would be a mere blip on the screen of public consciousness, kept alive only by the True Crime industry.

Living in the dark Underworld of 'Jerry Lynch'

For it is a relatively new feature of journalism south of the border that Crime Reporters are top of the heap. They churn out a seemingly endless diet of murder and more, salivating over the details, weaving it into the fabric of ‘what readers want’ and conveying it with all the self-serving certitude of their police informants. It’s like an endless reel of the cult movie Intermission, with Colm Meaney’s over-the-top detective character ‘Jerry Lynch’ directing all the action.

Twenty-five years ago, Dublin newsrooms had ‘Security Correspondents’ whose main job was to monitor and report on the spill-over of violence from the North. ‘Indigenous’ violent crime, not connected to the North, was rare and largely played down by the police because it happened in marginalised and impoverished working-class communities.

Yet the onset of the peace process brought a commensurate rise in the level of ‘crime reporting’. Today, Dublin’s coterie of ‘Crime Reporters’ form a new hierarchy in the industry. They combine into a new breed of reporter that specialises in bated breath, in-your-face eyewitness accounts, delivered with all the brashness of Hollywood goodfellas. The violent murder of their role model, Veronica Guerin, hardly brought a pause in their early gallop and they have now become the self-fulfilling prophets of our age.

Today, many of them even double as writers of churned-out popular crime fiction eagerly sought by publishers to supplement the diet of voracious readers and whet their appetite for the next instalment of reality. It is also noteworthy that among the new flush of crime novelists, the talented teacher from Derry Brian McGilloway focuses his fiction across the frontier in Donegal, an otherworldly Underworld of the imagination that is increasingly styled ‘Borderlands’, as if it was one actual place removed from the real Ireland.

Rupert Murdoch

Meanwhile, other crime reporters specialise in cut-and-paste books of their most salacious offerings for a regurgitated feast of sickening stand-out stories. And just in case you missed it all, there are ‘dot.ie’ websites dedicated to listing news of crime.

It is an endless carousel of crime that begets crime and we can’t even blame the evil empire of Rupert Murdoch who has little control over Dublin’s media machine.

So do I propose censoring news of crime?

Certainly not, but I can’t help feeling that the ascendancy of these Underworld overlords in our news industry has been at the expense of real news gathering, of competent hard-slog journalism that would focus on more than the sensationalised symptoms of a sick society.

Let’s disregard the endless repetition of that police lexicon of ‘thugs’ and ‘villains’, blaming them alone for spiralling violent crime.

Focus instead on the overwhelming majority of people in these marginalised communities who know themselves what can and cannot be done to improve their lives and the prospects of their children.

Let’s step back and resist ‘shock and horror’ for what many news editors would deem ‘boring angles’.

Let’s conduct a reasonable debate about the ‘criminalisation’ of drug addiction that feeds the twin maws of criminals and a ‘law and order’ cult.

Who knows, we might even reverse the seeming inevitable slide into crime as normal.

Non-political crime was once largely in the realm of TV drama

It happened up here with a lot more baggage to carry along and it can happen down there if society resists the dark world of ‘law and order’ doomsayers, and reassesses its values from a fixation with crime to a real focus on caring for ‘all the children of the nation’.

Meanwhile, I’ll probably be watching my back when I cross the Border. For as they used to say on Hill Street Blues, back in those halcyon days of the early 1980s when non-political crime was mostly the fare of American TV soap operas, ‘Let’s be careful out there.’

Cast a cold eye…

My first encounter with Aengus Fanning was on my very first day as a senior reporter for Independent Newspapers. I had come from Hibernia, where I had developed a particular interest in the meat-processing industry and its ‘colourful’ characters – cowboys with cash and butchers cutting a dash on a global counter.

Larry Goodman

For instance, I’d written an investigative profile of Larry Goodman, the man with the ‘biggest stake’ in the Irish economy! Nobody knew much about Goodman before that Hibernia article; it was reprinted by the Dundalk Democrat in Goodman’s home town, and in the Sunday Independent.
Perhaps that’s why I was hired by the Indo. For my part, I needed to finance a new family and home.
So there I was in Middle Abbey Street on my first shift, taking stock, when Aengus loomed in front of my desk. He fixed me with an unsmiling stare and introduced himself formally as Agricultural Correspondent.
‘I know you’ve written stories about agribusiness,’ he said coldly,and loudly, ‘but you will not do that here. That’s my area and you do not encroach on it without my approval … and I will not be giving it. Remember that.’
He turned on his heel and walked away. I sat dumbfounded while he made his way to his desk beyond the news editors, my face glowing from my public dressing down.

Aengus and I were colleagues (in the broadest sense) during my time at Independent Newspapers: we were never friends. He regarded me as an unwanted trespasser and we disagreed on most subjects, including the fundamentals of journalism.
I also resolved from that first day to get out as soon as possible. That happened when I was offered a better job with the new Sunday Tribune, ten months after passing through the portals of ‘Chateau Despair’.
During my time there, I learnt that such face-offs and in-house rivalries were commonplace. The then editor of the flagship Irish Independent Aidan Pender was about to retire. Successors were lining up and throwing shapes.
It affected us all. For instance, as general reporters, we were often instructed to ‘destroy our blacks’ (meaning we were to dump the carbon copies of typewritten stories) to prevent them being used by the next title. It was said jokingly that if the Evening Herald competed as well as it did against the (sister paper) Irish Independent, it might even take on the rival Evening Press.
I forged alliances. Then Sunday Independent editor Michael ‘Mixer’ Hand took me under his wing. We talked through the closing hours of Saturday night shifts in the Oval Bar. Mixer made no secret of being under huge pressure from rivals.

Vinnie Doyle

He showed up for my ‘going-away drink’, as did Vinny Doyle, Evening Herald editor. Vinny asked if there was anything I liked about Independent Newspapers. I told him I admired the ‘honesty’. He was surprised until I told him I meant the honesty of stabbing people in the front. He said he would use that himself … he did!
A few years later, Vinny was editor of the Indo and Mixer was out the door. I had seen off the Sunday Tribune and its short-lived cheeky sister, The Daily News. They collapsed at the end of 1982 and two tumultuous years.
I was now staffed at the Irish Press – where Mixer and Vinny had both learnt their craft – and had just been promoted to Agriculture Correspondent. I was back writing about Beef Barons.

At the Sunday Independent, meanwhile, new editor Aengus Fanning was shaping his ship. He nailed his colours to the mast, hired a crew of like-minded opinionators, dolled up his broadsheet with tabloid take-offs and pushed ‘personality’ journalism – where the reporter is central to the story – to deadly lengths.
He had bust-ups (and at least one full-scale fistfight), fall-outs and scurrilous campaigns, the most virulent against subsequent Nobel Peace laureate John Hume. His star Veronica Guerin was shot dead by drug criminals she baited on the Sindo’s front page. There were climb-downs, pay-offs and put-downs.
Backed by a Bean Baron, Aengus’s star rose steadily, seeing off the fatally mismanaged Sunday Press and stifling the resurrected Tribune by placing it in financial bondage. It clambered to the top with half the circulation of the Sunday Press in my time.

Bertie Ahern and Aengus Fanning

But it consistently lost readers as Aengus traded in ‘tottie’ and tittle-tattle, backed Bertie and Britain’s war on Iraq, shored up Seanie and fawned to Fingers, while inflating the bubble and roasting those he set his mind against.
Yet nothing succeeds like excess and he pronounced that only commercial success counts in journalism. Those who hail his death as the passing of Ireland's 'greatest editor' appear to agree.
Of course Aengus always had his champions, especially among those he elevated. One wrote this week: ‘He was brave to the point of bravado. He challenged all the accepted norms. More than 20 years ago he blazed a trail in his utter fearlessness in confronting all the undisturbed pillars of Irish life. Whether it was the Catholic church, Fianna Fáil or the IRA.’ (sic)

Life moves on and so do we. In 1986, I approached a few publishers with a proposal for a book on the Beef Barons. They declined. One said, 'Only farmers would be interested in that and farmers don’t read books.’ A few months later I moved to Canada. I had barely established a new career in journalism there when a bestseller emerged from the Beef Tribunal scandals back in Ireland. It made very familiar reading!
I’ve worked in a dozen newsrooms on both sides of he Atlantic Ocean over the past 35 years. I’ve learned that journalism is a craft honed on competition and collaboration. It thrives on mutual support, on mentoring and encouragement of those coming behind. As a reporter and editor, I’ve worked with many who disagreed strongly with me on a host of issues and I am proud to have had them as colleagues and friends.
On one occasion, I was exposed directly to the dark side of journalism. It came on that day when Aengus Fanning loomed like an avenging angel in front of my desk and smote me publicly.
He probably forgot his beef with me. I didn’t.