Dwyer trial cast a light into darkest corners of Irish society

It’s chilling to realise a woman can go missing in Ireland without an outcry

In the end, there was little relief at the guilty verdict in the trial of Graham Dwyer – whatever relief there might have been was reserved for the conclusion of a long and often traumatic trial that cast a light into the darkest corners of the human psyche and Irish society.

But there will be no easy moving on as the country collectively clicks on the next headline or braces itself for the next sensational trial. Not this time.

The systematic dismantling of the married architect’s protestations of innocence by the gardaí and the prosecution in the course of the eight-week trial was accompanied by a simultaneous stripping away of our collective innocence.

Even watching from afar, through the medium of the measured language of the daily court reports, was difficult, sometimes shattering. Now we know the things humans are capable of doing to one another in the name of sexual desire, power, or other, darker forces beyond most of our understanding – and there can be no unknowing, no unseeing.

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For those who sat through the trial day after day, either because of professional obligation, personal relationships, prurient curiosity, or a simple desire to see justice done, the lingering memory of those videos, those text messages, must be so much harder to bear.

Ireland is now forced to re-examine its image as a place where people still look out for one another; where someone might be expected to reach out in comfort when a woman is spotted crying inconsolably on a gravestone.

Ours is no longer a society where children routinely walk to school and adults stroll the streets of the capital at night without a second thought, but we might still have believed it to be a place where women don’t just vanish into thin air without a major public outcry.

No more.

Because now we know that in Ireland in 2012, a woman could vanish, the victim of a calculated and carefully-executed violent murder, with barely a ripple until her remains were discovered a year later in the forest.

If newsworthiness is that hard to define quality that makes a story worth telling, what was it about Elaine O’Hara that deemed her so much less newsworthy than other Irish women who have disappeared?

The easy explanation is that, with her psychiatric history and no immediate evidence of foul play, suicide seemed at first the most likely cause of her disappearance.

Even so, women don’t vanish every day in Ireland; they don’t routinely walk out of their homes and not come home, and when they do there is usually a substantial media response.

Was there something darker and more unconscious at work, a kind of unspoken hierarchy of the disappeared which dictates how much attention they deserve?

If Elaine O’Hara had looked different, or been more conventionally attractive – if she had had the kind of face that can be relied upon to sell tabloid newspapers – would we have been familiar with that face, and with her name, long before her bones turned up on the side of a mountain and her belongings in the bottom of a reservoir?

The other thing the trial brought into sharp relief is how little we know about the battles being fought inwardly by others. She was a woman whom, to the outside eye, might have seemed to have had a full life: she had two jobs, a family – including a loving father and stepmother who were deeply concerned about her welfare – and she planned to volunteer at the Tall Ships festival the week after her disappearance.

As Mr Justice Tony Hunt alluded to in the course of his 10-hour charge to the jury, one participant in the textual relationship between the Slave and Master phones kept floating "mundane things." What Elaine wanted from her relationship with Dwyer was very different to what he wanted from her. She texted him about wanting a baby and wanting someone to love her; he texted her about wanting "to stick my knife in flesh when sexually aroused".

She was desperate for affection, so desperate that she was willing to allow the boundaries of what she considered acceptable physical force to be manipulated and overturned again and again; so timid that she seemingly went along with Dwyer’s talk of murder and stabbing.

We will never know if she drove to the cemetery that day with any understanding of what he had planned for her, or if she believed that he was simply interested in more of what he, sickeningly, liked to call “play”.

Elaine O’Hara’s interest in BDSM seems to have predated the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon but it has shown the book’s ‘empowering female sexuality’ schtick and the way in which it packages violence as something desirable, and consent as negotiable, for the dangerous, misogynist nonsense that it is.

In the end, perhaps the most poignant moment in the trial came in the closing statement by the prosecution, as it set out to remind the jury of the “tragic, sad and unfortunate” situation Elaine O’Hara found herself in. When she was admitted to St Edmundsbury mental health facility on July 2012, Sean Guerin SC revealed, the notes accompanying her admission stated: “Supportive dad. No friends.”

She was ripe for grooming by Dwyer, something he recognised and ruthlessly exploited. If she had had friends, someone outside her obviously loving family to talk to other than the man on the Master phone, it might all have ended so differently.