The Irish Taboo Against Mentioning in the Same Breath Susan Denham (of the Supreme Court Panel That Sprang George Gibney in 1994) and Patrick Gageby (Gibney’s Barrister and Denham’s Brother)

PREVIOUSLY:

“The George Gibney Victory Lap — And Beyond,” July 6, https://concussioninc.net/?p=16697

by Irvin Muchnick

Two days ago I was interviewed about the George Gibney verdict by Shane Coleman for The Hard Shoulder on Ireland’s Newstalk radio. In the course of it, I mentioned, matter-of-factly, that going forward there needs to be scrutiny of the mechanics of the collapse of the original prosecution of Gibney more than 30 years ago. That case got scuttled by a controversial 1994 ruling of the Irish Supreme Court that the passage of time between dozens of instances of the defendant’s alleged abuse, and the impending trial of them, had fatally compromised his constitutional rights.

The case was dismissed. Gibney moved to Scotland, then the United States. Last year he was extradited and re-indicted on fresh charges by four new complainants. This week he was found guilty on 39 of them. He’s scheduled for sentencing later in the month. 

The Supreme Court panel that ruled in Gibney’s favor included Susan Denham, later the chief justice. Gibney’s barrister, both then and in the recently concluded, and scandalously delayed, new trial is Patrick Gageby – Denham’s brother.

In my Newstalk interview, Coleman interjected to assure listeners that Justice Denham is highly respected. And the clip of the interview then got withheld from standard recirculation online.

Per Irish television and radio practice, my interview had been “vetted” by a producer, and the producer heard me say the same thing about Denham and Gageby in the pre-interview.

In an email today, that producer told me, “As I am sure you are aware, broadcast defamation laws differ in Ireland from those in the US, and due to legal advice we were advised to refrain from posting the podcast online.”

Decades into the agony of the abuse horrors of Gibney and others in the Irish Amateur Swimming Association, now Swim Ireland, the Denham-Gageby connection remains the third rail of coverage over there. In my view, this comprises one of the chief taboos keeping the nation from a proper reckoning of this latest chapter of the grim and endless abuse saga.

To the best of my knowledge, the only places where Irish news consumers have been able to glean even basic background data points of the ‘94 Supreme Court decision are Broadsheet, an online site that ceased publication in 2022, and Village magazine, in two articles by me.

In 2016, Broadsheet broke “The Chief Justice, Her Brother And How Gibney Got Away,” https://www.broadsheet.ie/2016/04/29/the-chief-justice-her-brother-and-how-george-gibney-got-away/.

In my 2019 Village article “Swimming away from accountability,” https://villagemagazine.ie/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Muchnick-GIbney.pdf, I wrote:

“This case has offered up a litany of delinquency. As long ago as 1994, Justice Susan Denham pointedly failed, as she was entitled to do, to recuse herself from the Supreme Court panel that ruled the passage of time had fatally prejudiced Gibney’s ability to defend himself against dozens of counts of indecent carnal knowledge of minors. Gibney, already mysteriously armed with a diversity lottery visa, would proceed to hopscotch to the United States by way of Scotland.

Apparently the (admittedly small) State has lacked ethical standards barring a justice (in this case Denham) from hearing a matter argued by her own sibling (in this case Gibney’s barrister Patrick Gageby). That lapse is now putatively to be corrected, thanks to the Judicial Council Act 2019 applying a code modelled after the Bangalore Principles, promulgated by the United Nations in 2003. There you have it in Section 4.4 A: “A judge shall not participate in the determination of a case in which any member of the judge’s family represents a litigant or is associated in any manner with the case”.

The Denham-Gageby connection launched Broadsheet.ie’s minority-of-one Irish media stance in what we can call Gibney coverage 2.0. This upgraded muckraking comprised exploring what more there was to say about the quasi-fugitive two-time Olympic head coach, beyond that he was this unprecedentedly heinous guy – one whose life, after getting away with it, devolved into an anonymous odyssey across three separate regions of the vast US. Nodding to this parapeticism, in his purest helping of infotainment baloney, podcast producer-narrator Mark Horgan churned out hours of redundant hushed audio supporting the manipulative notion that he had exclusively tracked down Gibney with ace detection methods.”

After Gibney’s extradition last year, I wrote, at https://villagemagazine.ie/as-predator-george-gibney-is-extradited-what-really-happened:

“[…] Not until 2019 were Ireland’s judicial ethics guidelines reformed to say that judges should not consider cases involving close relatives. To a foreign journalist, the principle is intuitive with a capital I. It is a gloss on a Latin formulation: nemo judex in causa sua, or “no one shall be a judge in their own cause”. 

Yet a number of my Irish friends demur. They have tried to impress upon me that, in a country of only 5 million, where many members of the elite legal stratum inevitably know each other and some are even related, it is not so nefarious that this rule of thumb is, or until recently was, fungible. On that point, you can colour me sceptical. They further point to the protocol that barristers cannot  choose the clients on whose behalf they act, if the work is within their area of expertise. […]

It appears, facially, that Gageby’s representation of Gibney was not a one-off. Gageby was a proactive and highly public advocate in the whole category of “false memory syndrome”, which was in vogue at the time. But in a critique of the Irish media’s performance, the most salient thing is not local cultural nuances that might escape an American’s grasp. The most salient thing is the very taboo on even mentioning and parsing Denham-Gageby.”

***

To be very clear, I’m well versed in the sundry manipulations of news media outlets in both my country and Ireland. I don’t take them personally. However, I do use pertinent anecdotes to educate readers on the meaning of these vagaries.

In America’s First Amendment-protected environment, such episodes usually involve powerbrokers acting like jerks and subtly containing content on their outlets as they see fit, which is their right, even if abused.

In Ireland, the instances most often speak to a frightened national sensibility – a society that has achieved modernity in so many other ways, but continues to be crippled by an antiquated legal system that refuses to come fully to grips with the atmospherics of its tragic legacy of sexual abuse.

In 2007, I got berated on air in a one-sided rant by Fox News crackpot Bill O’Reilly. In production techniques pioneered by Ted Koppel’s Nightline on ABC nearly 30 years earlier, I was in a sensory-deprived remote satellite hookup booth, unable to see my antagonist, as he saw me, nor to know when my microphone was on or off. The whole thing was mostly amusing. See “My Life of O’Reilly: A Memoir,” Beyond Chron, April 20, 2009, https://beyondchron.org/my-life-of-oreilly-a-memoir/, and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asTdiVWf4gM.

In 2019, the VICE TV show Dark Side of the Ring flew me to Las Vegas for an hours-long interview for an episode about the 1983 murder by WWE star wrestler Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka of his girlfriend Nancy Argentino. Almost nothing I said got used. The next year, when the documentary aired, I was invited to be on the talkback panel for an after-show. I took the booking on condition that the shoot would be live-to-tape. They lied about that and again left almost everything important on the cutting-room floor (including the host responding to me, “I think it’s a fair point”). See “Dark Side of the Ring: Jimmy Snuka and the Death of Nancy Argentino,” SLAM! Wrestling, April 15, 2020, https://slamwrestling.net/reviews/guest-column-dark-side-of-the-ring-blandly-convicts-snuka-in-the-court-of-public-opinion-blanket-censoring-the-whole-story/.

And prior to this week, I’ve had many opportunities over the years to bob and weave with Irish media. Usually, I’m booked in the expectation I’ll provide boilerplate regurgitation or reinforcement of the local coverage. When something original does manage to get presented, hearts flutter and legal departments weigh in to censor the final broadcast product.

Now, let me emphasize that I never go into these shots with the goal of practicing guerrilla theater. These are their programs, not mine. I’m simply projecting my brand of journalism. (True sensationalism, I’d maintain, consists in the prurience of the abuse details of Gibney and his like – though I also concede that a measure of redundancy in reviewing scenarios of grooming, molestation, and rape is necesssary and instructive.)

When I’m warned in a pre-interview screening to avoid particular topics or names, I abide by the local standard, with restrained rue and mirth. The censors tend to be duly apologetic. That’s what happened the day after my Newstalk interview, when I appeared on RTÉ Radio’s Morning Ireland. (I’m not going to bother posting that clip, which largely consists of holding forth on how I feel about the Gibney verdict and how I divine Gibney victims and others feel.)

The censorship on discussing the corrupt participation of Justice Susan Denham in the case of George Gibney, represented by her brother Patrick Gageby, is no trivial lapse. It is, rather, an opening into the broader structural flaws of the Irish system – of the persistence of and fundamental lack of closure for the country’s historical and ongoing sexual abuse problem.

More on all this as post-Gibney commentary continues.