Remembering... Catherine Nevin, Nora Wall, John Gilligan, victims, barristers, judges and criminals

Mary Wilson, RTÉ's legal affairs correspondent, recalls her 10 years at the Four Courts and looks forward to presenting a new drive-time radio programme. In interview with Vincent Browne

The day I started as legal affairs correspondent in January 1996 Des Hanafin's challenge to the divorce referendum was commencing in the High Court and the trial of Brendan O'Donnell for the murders of Imelda Riney, her son Liam and Fr Joe Walsh began in the Central Criminal Court. I was in at the deep end and it hasn't stopped since.

The other big cases I covered were those arising from the murder of Veronica Guerin. These took place in the Special Criminal Court (no jury). The country was still enraged by what had happened. The first of those cases was the trial of Paddy Holland and there was that extraordinary day where a young woman Garda went into the witness box and she said she stopped him in Dún Laoghaire because she believed that he was the man who had shot Veronica Guerin and he was always referred to in that way since.

Then there were the cases of Paul Ward, Brian Meehan and John Gilligan. Brian Meehan's appeal has just been heard and we are awaiting the decision. He is the only one now serving a term of imprisonment for Veronica's murder.

Catherine Nevin's trial would be the most sensational trial that we've had in the last couple of decades. You often got the impression as the case was evolving that nobody knew what was going to happen, particularly when she decided to give evidence.

In the middle of it all, she disappeared and she'd apparently had some type of episode or overdose in her flat and she ended up in St James's Hospital overnight and she was back in the court again to explain what had happened.

There were these characters coming in telling us that she'd actually gone to them and asked them if they'd knock off her husband and these weren't trained killers in any sense, these were guys with peripheral links to criminality in some cases and she was going after them to carry out these murders. You had a judge (as a witness), you had a Superintendent, it was the dream cast for a movie and it was all there. And then you had a jury that went off for about five days to deliberate. In the middle of all that, the media was under fire. The print media wasn't allowed write one word about Catherine Nevin's demeanour, her hairstyle, her nails, her clothes, her anything because of the way the case had opened. It was fascinating, it went on for four months.

Somebody murdered her husband for her and we still don't know to this day who killed Tom Nevin.

Another case that stands out in my memory was the Nora Wall case. I remember walking into the Central Criminal Court one morning and all I knew was that someone who was supposed to be a nun was going on trial for rape. I saw this little woman with a blunt cut hairstyle, no makeup, sitting on the bench with a gap of about five yards between her and a man who looked as though he had some disability.

And then the trial opened and it always seemed that there was something. As a journalist, I can't describe it but something didn't sit right with the way the case was developing, with the way the evidence was flowing. It just didn't tally for me. I remember going to my news editor and saying, while the trial was still running, I'd like to go down to Cappoquin (where Nora Wall had been based and where the crime allegedly took place) and just see who I can find, start talking to people and that's what I did.

I went down there for a few days, met people on the street, got to know them. I did what a journalist does, I started snooping around Cappoquin. I also remember I met a lot of people who might have had issues and difficulties with Nora Wall over a range of subjects but I never met anybody who believed that she'd done it [conspired in the rape of a young girl]. But she was convicted, got a life sentence.

We put together about a five-minute piece which we broadcasted the night she was sentenced, raising these doubts, and it was quite brave on the part of the head of news, Ed Mulhall, to broadcast it. [Later Nora Wall and her co-accused were cleared of the charge, when it emerged they had been "set up".]

I was often struck by the dignity of families of victims. They arrive in the courts and don't know what's going to happen, how it's going to happen, what their role is, if they have a role and then having to deal with what the result is.

Remember Mary Murphy, the mother of Brian Murphy, the Club Anabel chap, and her speech at the end of the trial where she talked about being lost and her son being lost in the whole system? That really struck a chord with me and I remember saying to a couple of lawyers her statement should be required reading for every barrister because you shouldn't forget that while you have a job to do, there are human lives here as well and you have to respect them.

There was another woman, I remember, her son who was 15 was killed for his mobile phone down in Co Laois. She gave a very emotional impact statement as well about the effect of the criminal process stepping in when you lose a child, of how she didn't get his body home for a couple of days because it was left lying on a river bank to wait for the State Pathologist. That sort of real life story.

There was then the Murphy judgement in the Supreme Court, some people call it the Irish Times judgement, I like to call it the Murphy judgement because it involved all the media organisations. This was a challenge after a Cork judge had decided not to allow media reporting of a drugs case because there had been some issue in relation to a particular publication. That was challenged by the media and we got a really important Supreme Court decision and I always remember a line from it, which is that the media are the eyes and ears in this electronic age. It gave the media a right, that was never before, I mean it was in the Constitution that justice be administered in public, but it was acknowledging that in the world we live in, the media is the eyes and ears of the public. I think that judgement should be built on to allow greater access through media for the public and by that I mean allowing it, be it audio or television, to bring greater access to the public.

The Supreme Court is a very interesting place to spend some time for the quality of the argument, not for the judgement, the quality of the argument as a case is being appealed. It's great to see judges like Hugh Geoghegan and Ronan Keane, when he was there, challenging barristers who had to respond on their feet and to hear the likes of a Dermot Gleeson or a Paul Gallagher or a John Rogers, thinking on their feet, developing arguments in front of the judges as the case is moving on. It gives you a sense of where these cases are going.

Paul Carney is an extremely good criminal judge and he is also presiding in the Central Criminal Court. So he's had, if you like, two jobs. One job was to try and sort out the criminal court system where, a few years ago, it had backlogs up to three years waiting for trial. He sorted that out. There isn't a backlog now, trials can be returned for trial within a few months. He also has had to deal with such a range of cases and he has dealt well with them, invariably sensitive to the plight of the victim.

Elizabeth Dunne is a very impressive judge. She was in the Circuit Court, she's now in the High Court.

So many judges will impress you for different reasons. We often hear talk of mandatory sentences for a whole range of crimes. Every case is different. If you sift through criminal cases and you sift through the evidence and you sift through the history of an individual, you can see reasons why particular sentences are handed down – not all the time but you can certainly sometimes see why a particular sentence has been handed down in a particular case. So one thing you have to look at is more than just the bottom-line sentence and look at how it is arrived at.

We don't of course see what's happening in the family courts because we still have no right of access there at all. So we don't know what way the family courts are evolving. I would argue that a way has to be found to allow for reporting in the family courts. We do accept in-camera rules in relation to sex abuse cases for years and I think if you look back you find that it's rare, if ever, that the in-camera rule has been breached by the media. Michael McDowell has talked of now having some sort of monitoring in the family courts but that's different to allowing media access. It should be looked at again to blow away the mystery and maybe some of the perhaps misleading information that's out there.

Why am I leaving? I was offered a job which I was very interested in. I went into broadcasting to be presenter and, 16 years later, I'm going back into Montrose to do just that. I've had a wonderful time in the courts, I've learned a lot, I've been moved. I've been educated.

Something people say to me about my coverage of the courts was that it informed them, and what I hope I can do now on Drivetime is continue to inform people on what's happening, not just in the courts anymore but across board.

Mary Wilson

She is a farmer's daughter from Drangan, Co Tipperary, which is at the foot of Slieve na mBan near Clonmel. She went to the local national school, then to the Presentation Convent in Ballingarry, Co Tipperary and afterwards she did a course in journalism at Rathmines, now Dublin Institute of Technology. Her first job in journalism was with the Clonmel Nationalist and then she worked for Tara Publishing in the trade magazine sector. She spent five years in public relations for Shannon Development, working out of Shannon and then New York. Then to the Limerick Post for a year before she got a job with RTÉ in the Cork studios in 1989. She moved to the newsroom in Montrose in 1990. She reported on a variety of stories for radio and television before being appointed legal affairs correspondent in 1996. Now after ten years in the Four Courts she has been appointed presenter of the new drive-time programme on Radio One.