The strange case of the country postman who vanished one Christmas Day

TRUE CRIME: THOMAS McCARTHYreviews The Missing Postman: What Really Happened to Larry Griffin?By Fachtna Ó Drisceoil Mercier Press, 320pp. €14.99

‘AH, HE MUST be gone with the Stradbally postman,” my mother used to say, looking down the road as we waited for my father to come home in Cappoquin, Co Waterford. That was nearly 40 years after the disappearance of Larry Griffin, but the image of an abandoned postman’s bicycle on the Stradbally-Kilmacthomas road had entered the urban mythology of Waterford life. Perhaps only Tadhg Ó Dúshláine, the writer and folklorist of NUI Maynooth, could fully explain how the disappeared may assume a second, spectral life that filters through posterity, generation after generation.

Just yesterday, as I was posting some letters in Cork, a fellow post-office customer noticed that I was carrying Fachtna Ó Drisceoil’s book. The man wanted to know if I’d read it. I said I had nearly finished. “I knew Garda Ned Dullea,” the man said. “A sharp dresser if ever there was one. The ladies loved him. They were all jealous of him in the Garda. He was badly treated by the authorities, I can tell you. Sure it was obvious what happened: the postman was dead drunk and fell down the stairs and banged his head off the concrete floor.”

With that the customer was off out the door. So even to this day, and as far away as metropolitan Cork, the theories and hearsay continue.

The Stradbally postman, whose name was Larry Griffin, disappeared on Christmas Day 1929. Ten people, including a publican, his wife and two children, a schoolmaster and two gardaí, including Ned Dullea, were charged with his murder. It was a truly bizarre case, probably ill judged by FJ McCabe of the District Court and hastily prosecuted by the State solicitor EA Ryan and the barrister Thomas Finlay, though the unbearable pressure placed on the investigating team by the Garda commissioner Eoin O’Duffy and the deputy commissioner Éamon Coogan precipitated a series of hasty conclusions and prolonged unjust detentions. At the trial in Waterford the two accused gardaí were defended by none other than Capt Willie Redmond TD.

There was no body, a bitter inconvenience to any prosecuting counsel. The lack of a corpse was no fault of the Garda investigators, who had exhaustively and hugely expensively searched the bogs and mineshafts between Stradbally and Bunmahon. In the witness box at the preliminary hearing Jim Fitzgerald, a local farm labourer who was one of the State’s star witnesses, denied his own statements:

Finlay: “Is that your signature?”

Fitzgerald: “Yes.”

Finlay: “Is that a statement you made to Chief Supt O’Mara on 23 January last?”

Fitzgerald: “Yes, but I may have told some lies about it.”

Fitzgerald began to demolish a witness statement that was so vivid and complex that Chief Supt Harry O’Mara of the Waterford division was convinced of its veracity. O’Mara was eventually replaced and overruled by übercop Supt Hunt.

Fachtna Ó Drisceoil creates a marvellous narrative of official panic, bullying, frustration and eventual failure. He recently gained increased access to Garda files, and his book relies heavily on this new information, as well as on the research done for an excellent, atmospheric RTÉ documentary broadcast in October 2009. The book is written in a factual, anti-poetic manner, sticking to official reports, transcripts and published newspaper accounts, as well as on two crucial unpublished manuscripts: Chief Supt Harry O'Mara's Stradbally Caseand Tadhg Ó Dúshláine's Any News of Poor Larry?

Sometimes the narrative is interrupted by a character's backstory, especially when it reveals the force of Co Waterford lower- middle-class snobbery, or by editorial interjections of youthful simplicity ("As I began to trawl painstakingly through the newly released documents. . ."). The recorded speech of rural Waterford makes for a plain style, and there is no sustained attempt to overlay the tragic events with a memorable literary sheen. This is not Truman Capote's In Cold Blood; it is more along the lines of the late and venerable Tom Tobin of the Dungarvan Leaderas he recounted the rescue of the Kerlogue or the Mount Melleray centenary. The following passage is typical:

As he moved closer to the Five Crossroads and Stradbally village, his breath visible in the frosty air, there wasn’t another soul to be seen. But something in the distance caught his eye – a black object lying in the middle of the road. Curious to know the nature of the mysterious object, Connors quickened his pace. As he neared it, the mysterious object took on the form of a bicycle.

That bicycle would become the iconic image of an absence, haunting playwrights and novelists of the calibre of Flann O’Brien. Posterity still hovers over this bicycle like a David Lynch camera. Ó Drisceoil’s excellent book, with its clear narrative and its lavish and haunting illustrations, may become the definitive statement on Larry Griffin.

Thomas McCarthy is a Co Waterford poet. His latest collection is The Last Geraldine Officer, published by Anvil Press, 2009