There was a clanging inevitability that the Dublin press would one day be engulfed in a firestorm of its own making. Its coverage of the death of Liam Lawlor wasn't an uncharacteristic aberration; it wasn't even a good old-fashioned cock-up of the kind that all journalists have made before and will make again. Rather it was typical of the kind of journalism which is all too typical in Ireland today – vicious attacks on anyone who can't sue.
To the fore amongst that unfortunate group are the dead, and because Liam Lawlor was lying cold on a stainless steel table in a Moscow morgue he wouldn't be consulting m'learned friends. The papers have since given their own excuses for printing what they did and whether or not you believe them is entirely up to you, but the excuses count for nothing really when you consider one thing: if Mr Lawlor had been injured in that crash – had he been in a coma or on a ventilator that Saturday evening – none of what was published would have appeared in the paper. None of it.
The Sunday World screamed in horror that the woman who escaped with her life from the crash was a teenage "hooker", when in fact she was a professional woman in her thirties. In the northern edition of the same paper that same day there was a stream of ads for premium line phone services complete with come-on pictures: pleasure yourself; Ulster student wants older men; hungry for it; dirty and perverted; big tits no knickers; sweet 17 talks dirty, just listen; evesdrop genuine flith (sic); visit the bondage basement; party with exotic shemales. That this kind of stuff appears not in a top-shelf magazine in a heat-sealed plastic bag, but in a high-circulation Sunday paper accessible to all is clearly not a concern for the paper. But whether anyone at the Sunday World is conscious of the irony of damning a man (wrongly in this case) for consorting with a prostitute while at the same time coining it in from bondage basements, lady-boy hustlers, filth and jerk-off lines is another question entirely.
Leading republicans and ex-prisoners know to their cost that the Dublin papers, and the Sundays in particular, declared open season on them a long, long time ago. It's not a question of morals or ethics, as the frothing hacks like to claim. If it were they'd say the same thing about just about anyone who's a republican and who thinks republicans were justified in taking up arms. But they select their targets carefully: much as they'd like to get stuck into high-profile figures who hob-nob with republicans, their first consideration is not whether or not they can write something colourful and vicious – they invariably can – but whether afterwards the target is capable of defending her- or himself. Cowardice is what it is.
When my 14-year-old sister was killed by a plastic bullet in 1981, the Sunday Times didn't write what the inquest was later to find to be the truth, that she was an innocent child wrongly killed; it didn't write the kind of stuff that newspapers normally like to write about dead schoolgirls – that she was a child who loved children and wanted to go to America and be a nanny, for instance; or that she loved to sing and dance; or that her last words were "Mammy, I want to go home." It wrote that her skull was abnormally thin and, had it not been, the impact would not have killed her. In other words, it wrote lies. The Belfast Telegraph wrote that there had been a full-scale riot in progress when the bullet was fired (there had not) and added helpfully that the dead girl had two IRA brothers in jail. A few days later my mother took a black taxi into town and walked to the Royal Avenue offices of the Telegraph. She asked to speak to someone, but no-one came down and she sat there alone for a couple of hours while the fearless hacks upstairs lowered their eyes and waited for her to go home. And home she did go, to sit under a large picture of her youngest child, where she remained until she died.
For us, for the Lawlors, for countless other families, it was an overwhelming ordeal. For the papers, it was another day at the office.
