The Irish Independent’s View: Justice for Sophie Toscan du Plantier remains as distant as ever, 29 years on. The Murder still Haunts West Cork.

Editorial

Yesterday at 05:30

‘Ireland did not do right by Sophie Toscan du Plantier. On Christmas Day in 1996, her lonely brown coffin was mechanically elevated and loaded into the belly of a plane, to be flown home as air cargo. That fundamental wrong was compounded over the decades that followed. Taoiseach Micheál Martin was right to call it “a terrible stain on our country … what happened to a person of great substance who loved her visits to west Cork”. He made that remark when standing beside French president Emmanuel Macron at Government Buildings in 2021, and repeated it in the Dáil a year later – “a stain on our society”. It will never go away, Mr Martin added. “One could not but be struck by the nobility and the dignity of Sophie’s family.”’

– Senan Molony, Sophie: the final verdict.

Today marks the 29th anniversary of that stain on our society. The inability to bring a resolution for Sophie’s family remains a miscarriage of justice. The failure to punish the perpetrator is a national embarrassment.

At the launch of the aforementioned book last year, Micheál Martin spoke again about how the failure to deliver justice should “always be a deep shame for us”. Mr Martin said the murder of Ms Toscan du Plantier was “deeply shocking” and “remains seared into our consciousness”.

A cold-case review into the killing by the gardaí is nearing completion

The family of Ms Toscan du Plantier will mark the anniversary of her murder with a private ceremony. The 39-year-old French mother of one was beaten to death on a laneway leading to her isolated holiday home at Toormore outside Schull in Cork in the early hours of December 23, 1996. She was attacked just hours before she was to fly back to France to spend Christmas with her family.

A cold-case review into the killing by the gardaí is nearing completion. While there is always a chance of a breakthrough, this is the third review of the case file, on top of the garda investigation into the murder. Central to this review is new hi-tech forensic tests conducted on stored evidence – in particular, the rock and block from the scene, which were used in the assault. A new forensic test, on which there are high hopes pinned, is a DNA sampling technique developed in the US called M-Vac, which allows for minuscule samples to be tested from clothing, rocks and other surfaces.

The latest cold-case review into the murder was launched three years ago. Since then, the chief suspect for the murder, Ian Bailey, has died. The English journalist and poet was arrested by gardaí for questioning over the killing twice, in 1997 and 1998, but was released without charge on both occasions. But he was convicted by a French court in Paris of the killing in May 2019, in his absence. Mr Bailey repeatedly denied any involvement in the killing.

The cold-case review will include an examination of the timeline and records that became available upon his death. With Ian Bailey’s passing, the truth of what happened in the cold outside the holiday home in Toormore may never be known.