31 Martin Cahill

Around the end of the 1980s, an odd figure emerged into the grey light of an Ireland still struggling with recession. His name was Martin Cahill, but he called himself ‘The General’, and he was, by all accounts, a major criminal and a thoroughly nasty piece of work. But then, almost overnight, he became something of a star.

First he appeared on the primetime television current affairs programme, Today Tonight, wearing an anorak with the hood pulled up and with his hand covering his face. Sometimes he wore Mickey Mouse T-shirts and once he dropped his pants to show he was wearing Mickey Mouse shorts. Emerging from a period in Garda custody, he would wear a homemade balaclava and, as he made his way through the throng of reporters, hum to himself a simple tune.

Cahill was rumoured to have an unusual domestic arrangement: he was living simultaneously with two sisters, in two different houses. He came across as great crack altogether. He had an easy line in humour and some great yarns about how he would take the mickey (Mickey Mouse, geddit?) out of the cops who were keeping him under constant surveillance. Nobody was quite clear what this surveillance was intended to achieve, since Cahill was unlikely to try to commit any crime while he was being watched.

Nodding satirically towards his garda escort, The General would inform journalists that he was thinking of advertising for an armed garda escort for the movement of large amounts of cash. It would have been easy to forget that this joker had once nailed a criminal ‘colleague’ to the floor.

Cahill had spent most of his adult life in jail, mainly for relatively trivial offences. He had been suspected of many crimes, including the 1986 robbery of eleven priceless paintings in the Beit collection from Russborough House, County Wicklow. The haul included a Vermeer, a Goya and a Rubens.

Cahill had immense respect for An Garda Síochána. He believed it was a mistake to underestimate them, and the lengths to which they might go in order to get their man. Still, he regarded his dealings with them as a game, in which the main thing was not to show a reaction. In prison he learned to read, and read Dale Carnegie’s book, How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Martin Cahill told of an impoverished childhood. He had grown up as one of 12 children, the son of a lighthouse keeper. Convicted of his first criminal offence even before he entered his teens, he had spent time in Daingean reformatory, one of the most notorious of those Church-run institutions for orphans and wayward children which would in 2009 be exposed in the Ryan Report into abuse in Catholic-run institutions. When he was released from Daingean, he remained at liberty for two years before being jailed for four years for handling stolen property.

The General was to change not merely the popular concept of criminality in Ireland but also the way crime was reported. He would become the first subject of a new style of crime reporting, in which a kind of irony entered into what had previously been an unambiguously serious business. Thenceforth, the most gruesome thugs and sadists were given nicknames and written about as though they were soap stars, which in a sense they now were. Cahill was the first of a new breed of allegedly lovable criminals, the old rogue with a heart of gold who saw himself as a modern-day Robin Hood. He spoke about his deprived childhood and seemed to take it for granted that this justified his grown-up activities.

The Robin Hood subtext began to enter into the reporting of nearly all criminality. No story of the evil deeds of the latest drug warlord was complete without an account of his impoverished childhood and grievances against ‘the system’. Before The General, crimes were reported as offences against society, simple breaches of the law, demanding detection and punishment. But, after him, every criminal became potential inspiration for a film, or a novel, in which the ‘backstory’ was invariably rooted in a troubled past and a desire to ‘get even’ with society.

A new breed of crime reporter emerged who became to the criminal underworld what gossip writers had been to the showbiz scene. They wrote about the private lives of criminals, their sex lives, their rumoured deeds, heroic and otherwise. The reporters featured in dramatic television ads and created the impression that all this had something to do with investigative journalism. The criminal underworld, flattered by the attention, began to compete for stardom.

And this development seemed to be related to an even more ominous syndrome. Invariably in the wake of criminal outrages, the voices of certain journalists and amateur sociologists were to be heard even above the grief of those left bereaved by the actions of some monstrous Robin Hood. Eschewing the obvious explanation that the perpetrators of such obscenities were simply irredeemably evil, these voices speak of ‘alienation’ and ‘context’, explaining that such things happen because the perpetrators come from a class in society disenfranchised by virtue of economic and social marginalization.

As the years wore on, the crime figures went through the roof. Gang warfare broke out in several Irish cities, most notably Limerick. The media were hard-pressed to keep coming up with original nicknames for the criminals who came and often, despatched by the next in line for stardom, went.

Although the social theoreticians prated about social deprivation, the evidence was to the contrary. In the twenty years after Martin Cahill made his first television appearance, most sections of Irish society became steadily wealthier. It is true that an imbecilic social policy, which pursued unchecked urbanization as a path to ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’, had created appalling social ghettoes in many cities and towns, and that, as a consequence of short-sighted social welfare policies, these had become festering cesspits of idleness, ignorance, brutishness and self-destruction. But the deeper, cultural change was that, in tandem with the growth of these jungles, there had evolved a stream of public thought that sought to play down the imperative of personal responsibility in deciding that all wrongdoing emanating from these ghettoes could be explained by reference to ‘social factors’. Following an initial bout of public horror in the wake of each new outrage, the voices of enlightenment reasserted themselves to speak of ‘marginalization’ and ‘alienation’, thus destroying any chance of a concerted initiative against thuggery.

There is something to be said for the ‘social context’ analysis of crime – provided it is advanced purely as a cautionary note concerning the implications of social policy. Undoubtedly, the vast majority of the Irish criminal classes tend to emanate from the social welfare jungles we have deposited on the edges of our cities and towns. But to observe this as evidence of social policy mistakes is quite a different thing to advancing it in exculpation of criminal and murderous behaviour.

There is evidence that, since the brief stardom of Martin Cahill, self-justification on the basis of ‘social deprivation’ is becoming increasingly fashionable among criminals when they are apprehended. Even more worrying is the tendency for such notions to be trotted out by judges sitting in cases where these issues are highly irrelevant. One eminent judge, sentencing in a manslaughter case, made much of his negative impressions on a visit to the area where the convicted individual had grown up, making it clear that he was handing down a reduced sentence on this account. Martin Cahill, had he still been around, would have approved. He had been shot dead one August 1994 afternoon in the street, allegedly by the IRA in one of its final pre-ceasefire clean-up operations.