Lillis manslaughter – let’s not have a battle of the sexes

THE JURY in the trial of Eamonn Lillis delivered a verdict of manslaughter yesterday. Lillis was found guilty of the killing of his wife Celine Cawley but not guilty of her murder, the differentiating factor being that the they felt Lillis had not intended to kill Cawley.

Predictably the battle lines of the commentariat have been drawn along gender lines. Liberals are, on the whole, arguing that the reporting was biased in favour of Lillis and painted a picture of his late wife as an appalling and vicious tyrant. Conservative sections of the media, including the Irish Sun, are, in fairness, pushing the line that Cawley if not quite ‘had it coming’ at least sealed her own fate by pushing Lillis around.

Still, this is no reason to have a full-blown sex war. Susan McKay, speaking on RTÉ radio, managed, somehow, to link public interest to pornography – not pornography as a metaphor for the coverage, actual pornography before quickly moving on to confuse the issue by talking about other aspects of the coverage.

We have no way of knowing if Celine Cawley was a bullying harridan or if Eamonn Lillis was a frustrated and desperate figure. And it doesn’t matter either way.

Even if the most Lillis-friendly reporting happens to be true there is no argument to be made about sex or gender relations: killing people is wrong and provocation may result in a lesser charge and sentence but it doesn’t make the convicted and less guilty. In fact, arguments about ‘losing control’ due to abuse or bullying (which, for the record, Lillis’s defence team did not at any point make) are more commonly associated with the defence of women who have been beaten and belittled by their partners. What matters, though, is that everyone is supposed to be equal before the law.

The tabloid press is under fire for covering the case in a gossipy and prurient manner but this is pure snobbery. The tabloids cover crime stories in great detail. The difference here is that the elite media of the Irish broadsheets and RTÉ made a lot of hay with the reporting of this story – and are now making even more by commenting on it.

The class bias is so obvious it is barely worth mentioning – if Lillis and Cawley had been working class the case would barely have been covered at all. More interesting than this, however, is the fact that the prurient and indulgent media coverage existed at all.

In truth the Lillis case was a media storm that tells us a lot about how the Irish elite operates. The public has a right to know what goes on in courtrooms and no journalist should be barred from covering a trial. The tone of the Lillis coverage and endless updates on non-news from the courtroom (such as endless half-hourly reports of the fact that the jury was still deliberating) expose a ghoulish obsession with the dark side of life that is entirely out of proportion to reality.

The Lillis case was worthy of coverage, but not the amount it received, especially not when there was no evidence whatsoever that the public was interested in the endless parade of evidence shown to them by the media.

The fact that the details of the case were able to be squeezed into an existing narrative explains why there was so much made of it, but the narrative’s existence doesn’t make it true.