People of the Year - October

 The year in people: October

John Banville is Bookered, at last
‘Yesterday the Man Booker judges made possibly the worst, certainly the most perverse, and perhaps the most indefensible choice in the 36-year history of the contest,” wrote the London Independent after John Banville won the most high-profile English language literary prize in the world with his novel, The Sea. Other critics disagreed. “Banville writes novels of complex patterning, with grace, precision and timing, and there are wonderful digressive meditations,” said the Guardian. He received £50,000 in prize money and the book was in bestseller lists around the country at Christmas, whereas before it had sold relatively few copies.
The 59 year old former literary editor of the Irish Times was the outsider on the shortlist. Fashionable authors such as Kazuo Ishiguro and Zadie Smith were well ahead of him on the betting stakes, and he was virtually untipped by critics. He had been shortlised before for the prize for The Book of Evidence, a novel based on the murders of Malcom MacArthur. He was the first Irish winner since Roddy Doyle won with Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha in 1993.
His next book, a crime thriller called Quirke, will be published under the pseudonym Benjamin Black to indicate a change of mode for the Wexford man.
“What I feel most strongly is a spreading sense of relief at the thought that I shall never again have to worry about this prize... for I have been, at last, Bookered,” he wrote after his victory.
Cecelia  Ahern PS, I'm  an unstoppable success
It was the nomination for the 2006 Impac Dublin Literary Award, literature's most lucrative prize for a single work, that surprised them the most. They could handle huge sales: her third novel, If You Could See Me Now, was the bestselling work of original fiction in Ireland and Britain in 2005 according to Nielsen Bookscan data, outselling Terry Pratchet, Patricia Cornwell and John Banville's The Sea.
But to see Cecelia Ahern's PS, I Love You on the same list as such literary heavyweights such as Colm Tóibín was too much for some. “This must be another example of the legendary Scouse wit,” said an Evening Herald editorial, in reference to the fact that it was Liverpool City Library that nominated the Taoiseach's daughter for the award.
She won't be too bothered by the sneering. Her literary agent estimates that around four million copies of her “chick lit” (a term she despises) have been sold worldwide, and the film rights for If You Could See Me Now have been sold to Disney, which is planning to turn it into a musical starring Australian actor Hugh Jackman.
“I'm really comfortable writing,” she told Village earlier this year. “I can't imagine myself doing anything else. I mean, I'd like to try different styles of writing, maybe get into screen writing. I'd love to write a play. I love creating worlds and characters.”

Ian Bailey: falsely identified
In October 2005, Ian Bailey, who had been arrested for the murder of Sophie du Plantier in February 1997 in Schull, West Cork, entered the news again with an incredible twist to the murder inquiry. Key witness Marie Farrell approached Bailey's solicitor, Frank Buttimer, in April 2005 to tell him she had falsely identified Bailey at the scene of the murder. Buttimer wrote to the Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, to inform him that Farrell had withdrawn her “identification” of Bailey. She was the only eye witness of Bailey's presence near the scene of the murder and a critical witness in the libel proceedings taken by Bailey against eight newspapers in December 2003. Bailey lost the libel action. Marie Farrell's initial evidence described the suspicious person she saw as five foot eight inches. She now claims that she was pressurised by gardaí into giving a false statement, and that she changed her statement to say that the person she saw was five foot ten; she then said that the person was very tall and identified him positively as Bailey. She also claims she made senior gardaí aware that she was pressurised into making false statements.
Garda Noel Conroy has instituted an internal inquiry.  
Ian Bailey, an English man who has lived and worked in West Cork as a writer and freelance journalist with his partners Jules Thomas was the first reporter to be on the scene of the crime. His role as writer of news stories changed suddenly to being the lead character in news stories when Bailey was arrested for the murder of Sophie du Plantier. Du Plantier, a French woman and wife of a well known French film maker, Daniel Toscan du Plantier, was found brutally murdered on the 23 December 1996. No one has been charged with the murder.

Paul McGinley approaching his peak
Paul McGinley is your typical sports fan and he's had a good year. A Dublin, Celtic and Jordan GP fan (at least in the days when his mate Eddie was at the helm) he's seen a Leinster title, a resurgent Celtic capture Roy Keane and has catapulted himself up the world rankings in the last 12 months. Perhaps that's why his success has been one of the most popular Irish golfing stories in a long time.
Golf, as a singular pursuit, shouldn't quite inspire such fanatical devotion from grown middle-class men. But it does and McGinley is genuinely the best supported Irish golfer.
Recent weeks have seen Steve Davis, aged 48, reach the final of the Travis Perkins UK Snooker Championship, and Colin Montgomerie, 42, win the European Tour Order of Merit. Irish sport has its own late bloomer though – Paul McGinley is aged 39 and fast approaching his prime.
His win at the Volvo Masters, the European Tour's showpiece event in Valderrama, should prove to be a watershed. McGinley was a star of the Ryder Cup, sinking the winning putt and typifying the European team-spirit, but individual success was elusive.
He hadn't won a ranking title since the 2001 Welsh Open (won after the final round was washed out) coming into this year's Volvo Masters and when he was four over par after five holes of the second round his chances of ending that run seemed remote.
He was still four strokes off the lead going into the final round but a flawless closing four under par 67 ensured he finished two strokes ahead of local favourite Sergio Garcia. The pivotal moment came on the 17th when he put a wedge shot dead to close out the win. That shot was named the European Tour's shot of the year. A very big deal.  
McGinley now faces the biggest year of his career. The win at Valderrama needs to be accompanied by a challenge at one of the Majors. There is the small matter of the Ryder Cup at The K Club in 2006. McGinley will fear no one in that arena.

Liam Lawlor: controversial even in death
Had he died in his sleep or otherwise conventionally, the response to Liam Lawlor's passing would have been heavily conditioned by the controversies surrounding his political career. But the reckless and false reportage of the circumstances of his death, notably by the Sunday Independent, the Sunday Tribune and the Observer, evoked sympathy for himself and his family which might have been in short measure otherwise. These newspapers reported he had been killed in a car accident in Moscow in the early hours of 22 October in a red light district in the company of a teenage girl, who was “likely to be a prostitute”. The newspapers in question knew they didn't know whether this was true or false and yet they published. The woman in the car with Liam Lawlor, Julia Kushnir, is an employee of a law firm in Prague and a part time interpreter. She had travelled with him on the evening of 21 October from Prague to Moscow where he was doing business and required the assistance of an interpreter. The Observer went further and reported, without any authentication, that Liam Lawlor was a regular visitor to brothels in Prague.
Inquiries were instituted in Independent Newspapers and in the Observer/Guardian group in London. Both inquiries resulted in no action being taken against the persons responsible.

Colm O'Gorman's courage, persistance and intelligence drove investigation in abuse in Ferns
In February 1995, Colm O'Gorman walked into a Wexford Garda station and stated he had been raped by Fr Sean Fortune over a two-year period in the early 1980s.
Almost ten years later, O'Gorman's fight to have the crimes and failures of the Catholic Church documented and answered for culminated in the release of the Ferns Report. It was a defining event of the year – most particularly, the revelation of negligence and indifference on the part of the church leadership as a whole to the issue of abuse. (While protesting they did not appreciate the nature or scale of the problem until around 1995, it emerged they had taken out insurance up to eight years earlier to protect diocesan funds against claims for damages by sexually abused victims of clerics under their control.)
Sean Fortune killed himself in 1999, while awaiting trial. That year, Colm O'Gorman set up One in Four, an organisation to help victims of abuse, in London. But it was in 2002, when the documentary Suing the Pope, which followed O'Gorman as he returned to Fethard-on-Sea, was broadcast, that the history of abuse in Ferns, and official indifference to it, unravelled.   
Bishop Brendan Comiskey resigned almost immediately. The State commissioned a report from a senior counsel, which led to the Ferns Inquiry. The Vatican moved Bishop Eamon Walsh in as crisis-manager in Ferns. O'Gorman's One in Four opened up in Ireland.
The Ferns Report, published in October, was followed by a flood of revelations of abuse allegations against over 300 priests in dioceses across the country. The Government endorsed the report's recommendations, and O'Gorman wrote that it was "time to consign the sad and tragic history of the horrific sexual abuse of children and young people in the diocese of Ferns to history".
Less than two months later, O'Gorman was again in the media spotlight, this time dealing with the future, not the past, of child abuse and protection in the Catholic Church. The Church's new guidelines on child protection left "wriggle-room" on the crucial issue of reporting of abuse allegations, said O'Gorman: "There can be no discretion by any church employee as to whether or not to report an allegation of concern of abuse".
Ten years on, there is some way to go before the dark history of Ferns, which unravelled thanks to O'Gorman's courage and persistence, can truly be consigned to history.