Some deaths don't sell newspapers

Conor Brady contrasts coverage of two recent murders of women in Ireland and finds a revealing case study that does us little enough credit

What do we learn about ourselves as a society – and about sections of our news media – from the reportage of serious crime? Contrasting coverage of two recent murders of women in Ireland, Rachel O'Reilly and Paiche Onyemaechi, offers a revealing case study that does us little enough credit.

Rachel O'Reilly was 31. She was found bludgeoned to death last month at her home in North County Dublin. She was strong and athletic. Her photographs show a vital, energised woman. And it appears she fought valiantly with the person or persons who took her life.

Initial media reports suggested that she was the victim of an intruder, perhaps a burglar. Then, at an early stage, the burglar theory faded away and the crime reporters took up the theme of an assailant who had lain in wait for her as she returned to the family home.

Members of Rachel's family, including her husband, Joe, went on Pat Kenny's Late Late Show the week after she was killed to appeal for anyone with information to come forward to the Gardaí. It was a moving encounter, tense and poignant. It was also perhaps foolish because it gave the media the excuse that the story was now fair-game.

Since then, hardly a day has gone by without one or other of the tabloid newspapers carrying a "new" line of information on the investigation into Rachel O'Reilly's death, with her photograph being published time out of number. And there is a common theme to all of these reports – that Rachel O'Reilly was murdered by "someone she knew", that her killer was "familiar with the interior of the house".

Reporters and photographers have a pathway beaten to the house. There are colour pieces, lyrical descriptions of a neighbourhood in shock. To describe coverage as intensive is an understatement.

The thrust of the reportage has been to paint Rachel O'Reilly's husband, Joe, as her killer. As Diarmuid Doyle put it in the Sunday Tribune "several newspaper editors – enthusiastic practitioners of show-me-your-mickey journalism – have been competing with each other as to who can make it most clear that they believe Joe O'Reilly murdered his wife..."

Leaving to one side for a moment the ghastliness of any news medium taking to itself the right to discharge the functions of a judge and jury, let us look at the contrast with the coverage of the death of Paiche Onyemaechi.

Paiche was 25 and from Malawi. On 23 July her headless body was found by a riverbank in a field near the village of Piltown, Co Kilkenny. Her head has never been found.

There was an initial flurry of down-the-page coverage when it emerged that she was the daughter of the Chief Justice of Malawi, Mr Leonard Unyolo, and that he was coming to Ireland to take charge of her obsequies.

Local reporters learned that Paiche was a mother of young children, that she had been living in Waterford and had worked in Limerick. She had initially left Malawi to work in London and then came to Ireland with her Nigerian-born husband. The Gardaí have so far not succeeded in tracing him.

But one will scour the files of the national media and find nothing comparable to the coverage of Rachel O'Reilly's death. There are no colour writers looking for new angles among Paiche's friends and contacts in the immigrant community. There are no investigative reporters following leads through the clubs in Limerick where she is reported to have been employed.

One would have thought that here was an event to stir the instincts and curiousity of any news editor. A young, attractive mother is found decapitated in a field in a peaceful Irish village. There are suggestions of similarities to ritual killings elsewhere in Europe. There is a missing husband. But the murder of Paiche Onyemaechi remains off the main news agenda, while a team of detectives from Waterford work with their colleagues elsewhere in an effort to find out exactly what happened to her.

When a Nigerian woman, living in Waterford was arrested under the Offences Against the State Act, questioned about the killing and released without charge, it merited a few paragraphs in some of the national newspapers. Then all went quiet again.

The contrast in news values in the coverage of the two murders is striking and the conclusions are inescapable.

Rachel O'Reilly and the circumstances of her death are easily related to by the vast majority of those who read Irish newspapers – and in particular the tabloids. This was an ordinary, working woman, living in a nice house that was clearly her pride and joy, married to the kind of guy who could be anybody's neighbour. If it can happen to her, it can happen to anyone.

Paiche Onyemaechi and her life-circumstances were far removed from the experiences that are typical of modern Irish life for the vast majority of people. She was an immigrant, an African who had come here through the UK and who was living in that darkened world that touches on illegality in various forms. Whatever may have happened to her, whatever brought her to lie headless in a Kilkenny field, has nothing to do with us.

None of this is to take from the validity of the media continuing to focus on terrible crimes that remain unsolved and un-atoned. It is right that individuals – and their families – who have been the victims of violence, should not go unremembered.

Last Sunday, Brighid McLaughlin took readers of the Sunday Independent through a thoughtful and provocative review of the unsuccessful investigation into the murder four years ago of Raonaid Murray, at Glenageary, Co Dublin.

Raonaid's murder was the sort of tragedy that touched upon the fears of every parent in suburban Dublin. A young girl, her whole life before her, is set upon and brutally done to death within yards of the safety of home. The crime is apparently motiveless and Raonaid may well have been a random victim. It is right and proper that such a savage deed should not be allowed to fade from public consciousness. But I have the feeling, nonetheless, that in four years' time, neither the Sunday Independent nor any other Sunday newspaper will still be trawling through the murder file on Paiche Onyemaechi.

A similar point may be made in regard to the coverage, pre-trial, in-trial and post-trial, of the killing of Brian Murphy at Anabel's night club in Dublin.

There is hardly a reader of The Irish Times, Irish Independent, Star, Evening Herald or any of the Sunday newspapers who will not recognise his name.

But ask the same readers to give you the name of any one of the 40 young men who have died over the past five years in Dublin, generally by gunshot and generally because they have been involved to some degree or other in organised crime. Some may recall an earlier photograph from newspaper files, showing a hardened youth with dead eyes, being led in handcuffs from a criminal court. But that will be all. These are the Untermenschen – the socially irrelevant, who do decent people a favour by wiping each other out.

It is not so much that life has become cheap, but that different lives have begun to have different values placed upon them. Some lives – and some deaths – are valuable to the media because they feed into popular fears and apprehensions and consequently they boost readership or broadcast audiences. Other lives – other deaths – are not so valuable and can largely be ignored.

Rachel O'Reilly's murder offers certain sections of the media a win-win opportunity. The dreadful nature of the crime makes for compelling copy. The opportunity offered of being able to taunt her husband, time and again, ensures that the story is kept alive.

Conor Brady is Editor Emeritus of The Irish Times and a senior teaching fellow at the Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business where he lectures in modern media.