What makes a trial newsworthy?

Most trials that receive blanket media coverage, such as that of Eamonn Lillis, involve middle-class people who have committed violent crimes. Are we simply drawn to narratives that fit our everyday experience, or are darker impulses at play?

MEMBERS OF the public jostling each other to get inside the courtroom to hear every salacious detail first-hand, hundreds of column inches in the newspapers, and massive coverage on TV and radio. Most murder trials do not get this sort of attention. Those that do, such as the trial of Eamonn Lillis for the killing of his wife, Celine Cawley, almost always involve people from relatively privileged middle-class backgrounds.

“We can identify so easily with the very pedestrian domestic detail of a couple married for many years doing ordinary things in the lead-up to an event that is absolutely life-changing. In situations where the detail is different from our own lives, it does not connect with us. A gangland killing does not fit neatly into our everyday experience,” explains Dr Siobhán Barry, director of policy and external affairs at the College of Psychiatry of Ireland.

“The misery is far greater in cases of crime and criminality, but it doesn’t captivate us as much. There is a certain class element to it, but the key feature is the sense of identification with the domestic event. The trivial events that lead to a murder are what make it so interesting to people. It’s the classic case of the cap being left off the toothpaste event escalating into something that may not have been intended,” she says.

"A posh address goes a long way to guaranteeing saturation coverage," says Mary Carolan, High Court reporter with The Irish Times, who covered the trial of Sean Courtney for the murder of Patricia O'Toole, from Killiney, Co Dublin, in 1993. "She was brutally killed and her body dumped in the Dublin mountains. The following week after that trial, I covered the trial for the murder of a young working-class woman who was just as brutally killed, whose face was smashed in, and it did not get anything like the same coverage."

MIDDLE-CLASSnewspaper readers have responded to the Lillis case because they see the couple as being like them. "A gangland murder would be outside most people's experience, but a dispute between a husband and wife is closer to more people's experience. The case involved a male mid-life crisis, an affair, a successful woman and a former model who meets her end – everything is in the mix," Carolan says.

But our interest may be even darker, suggests psychologist Tony Bates, who believes that we identify on a deeper level than we realise. “A murder trial is essentially a story, and we relate to stories that pick up different parts of our own inner world,” he says.

We may be “very socialised, well-behaved” people on the surface, but each of us has a “dark side, shadows where we have murderous feelings towards ourselves and others, and sexual impulses that we manage to restrain. Yet we are intrigued when we see those impulses played out in the lives of other people. So we watch repressed parts of ourselves being played out in the courtroom with morbid fascination,” he says.

This fascination is part of the human condition, reaching back to the Greek tragedies and Shakespeare’s tales of murder in royal families. “A criminal trial is a theatrical event – a play with a beginning, middle and end,” comments Dr Eamon G Hall, a solicitor and examiner in constitutional law for the Law Society of Ireland.

Yet a trial is even more compelling than a play because it’s real. “Elements may be disputed, but a trial is based on a true set of facts. That’s why people queue up to get inside the court and people have to be turned away in relation to recent trials,” he says.

Trials in relation to forgery or accountancy don’t attract large audiences. “Sadly it’s ones related to sex or violence or death that have a greater fascination. It’s not something to be proud of, but it is true. A murder trial holds the one thing that will eventually meet and greet each one of us – death. There’s also a fascination with any sexual element, because death and sex are almost the ultimate in terms of human experience.”

We are more interested when these dramas involve middle-class and privileged people, because we are fascinated by the “fall from grace”, he believes. All social classes are attracted to a trial that holds the promise of showing people not living up to middle-class ideals, because more is expected of people from privileged backgrounds, whereas a trial involving people from lower social classes lacks this element, he says.

Hall says he learned this lesson as a young lawyer working for the State prosecution service. He dealt with the case of a young man from a well-off family who was in boarding school and was alleged to have forged a post office savings book. He asked a superior in the attorney general’s office whether there would be a “prerogative not to prosecute”, because the young man came from a good family and had a good education.

The reply he got was that “coming from a good family and in receipt of a good education only aggravated the seriousness of the offence.”

“If a person is middle-class, with a big house in a fashionable area of town, with money, there is more of an obligation on persons like that to behave themselves,” he says.

THE LILLIS TRIALcontains all the elements of "theatre" that the public are attracted to: the privileged background, the glamour of a house in an expensive area, involvement in TV and advertising, a victim who is a former model and therefore glamorous, an affair, and oodles of domestic detail, but the voyeurism that such a trial brings out in observers is not the most attractive aspect of human nature. In the court, members of the public have fought for seats like players in a rugby scrum, with one reporter even being elbowed in the stomach by a member of the public. The claustrophobic atmosphere at the Lillis trial has meant that people standing in the back of the courtroom have nearly been leaning on the heads and shoulders of family members of the victim, Celine Cawley.

Orla O’Donnell, legal affairs correspondent for RTÉ, believes that people have a right to be in the courtroom, because the public must witness the administration of justice, but at the same time “there is something awful about the voyeurism”, she says.

“It’s important that the public and the media are there, but it is hard to take sometimes, because this, at the end of the day, is about people’s lives and some people watching the trial seem to see it as a daily soap opera. There is a tendency to forget that this is about a dead woman and there’s a child involved, when people are focusing on what happens next.”

The usual murder trial, which involves people with drink problems and drug addictions from poor social backgrounds, don’t get half the coverage of a case such as the manslaughter of Celine Cawley, she adds. Nor do trials held outside Dublin.

The trial of Brian Kearney for the murder of his wife Siobhan, and Joe O’Reilly’s trial for the murder of his wife Rachel, got similar levels of coverage, because they too involved beautiful female victims and domestic middle-class situations. The public also likes the opportunity to gaze into the fishbowl of a privileged upper middle-class lifestyle, as in the trial concerning the fatal attack on Brian Murphy outside Annabel’s nightclub in Ballsbridge, Dublin.

THERE IS Agender aspect to interest in some cases, also. At the Lillis trial, two-thirds of the public attending have been middle-aged and elderly women. David Harvey, 4FM radio presenter and former presenter and producer of Crimeline, says that programme was most popular with women aged 40-plus. A Crimelineprogramme about the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier was one of the highest-rated in RTÉ's history, he says. The French woman was living on the side of a mountain in west Cork, painting, writing and photographing – the sort of life most women can only dream of – making her demise all the more interesting to women, he suggests.

The Lillis case, too, has a certain glamour about it that your average violent death doesn’t. “There is huge voyeurism around it in my view, and the audience isn’t necessarily middle-class,” says Harvey. All of the newspapers, not just those aimed at an ABC1 audience, have been giving the Lillis trial acres of coverage.

Are newspapers right to do this? O’Donnell says she is not sure whether media coverage of the Lillis case has created an appetite or responded to it. Says Hall: “The murder of someone involved with drugs is as heinous a crime as any other, and in fairness there should, in theory, be the same consideration given to it and the column inches should be equal or proportional, but we live in the real world and that is not so. People are geared up to what they think the readers will be interested in.”

“Two factors are important here, in my view,” says Ciaran McCullagh, a lecturer in sociology at University College Cork, “One is the question of who is fascinated, the media or the audience. What we saw in relation to the Joe O’Reilly case is what the Americans call feeding-frenzy journalism, justified by the media in terms of audience interest – but how do they know the audience is actually interested? Have audiences for news bulletins gone up? And newspaper sales? Stories seem to me to suit the contemporary readjustment of the news media, where economics are forcing a change, with most coverage devoted to a small number of stories, leading to an incredible narrowing of news agendas.

“The other, and possibly more important, factor is about class. ‘People like us’ do not commit murder. That is for people who are ‘known to the gardaí’. Middle-class people are not, in their own minds at least, violent. When middle-class people do commit murder and do behave violently, the perpetrator has to be exorcised and middle-class sensibilities restored. This struck me very forcefully in the Joe O’Reilly case and in the continuing interest and news stories that still come out about his behaviour and ‘lifestyle’ in prison. We have to be continually reassured that he is not one of us.”