When Don Blaney had recounted what was occurring to Joan Deitch, who had carried out the final edit of my debut novel, she was outraged. Joan is a demure and quietly-spoken Englishwoman who has also edited countless best-selling novels by the likes of Jackie Collins, Josephine Cox and the crime writer Martina Cole – to name only three. Joan is also a person of great honesty – an attribute all good editors must have when giving an appraisal to a writer about a manuscript they have just submitted. She immediately volunteered to travel from London to attend court and give evidence about what the role of an editor entails – and the work that she had done with Don on What Goes Around. She then heroically trawled the bookstores of the English capital looking to buy copies of my book, which by then was nine years old. Fortunately, while What Goes Around was never the blockbuster my publisher hoped it would be, it did sell steadily and so its shelf life proved to be much longer than many novels which had lots of publicity and initially sold in bigger numbers. The day before the trial, Joan arrived in Cork with six copies – one of which was given to Don’s solicitor who placed so many post-it notes demarking a reference to firearms that it was almost twice the depth of the others by the time it came to court.

However, when Don and Joan arrived for the first morning of the trial they were greeted by a very upset solicitor: the prosecution wanted to introduce a ‘vast amount’ of new evidence and revise the charge sheet and petition for the trial to be moved to the non-jury Special Court in Dublin where suspected terrorists are tried. Don was ushered into a room to meet with a concerned Tom Creed. He had a number of questions for Don. Had he ever heard of the Garda Collation Office? Did he ever visit the bars of Passage West? Don is teetotal and the answers were ‘no’ and ‘no, except for a quiz night to raise money for a Romanian orphanage.’ The barrister then mentioned a name and asked if Don knew this person. Don replied he did and that person had a chronic drink problem. Tom Creed nodded as if satisfied with what he had heard and drew a deep breath. He had a pre-trial meeting to attend.Apparently, an indignant Tom Creed SC is a sight to behold. Not that Don got to see it but his solicitor was able to relate as much. The Collation Office, housed within the Garda HQ in Cork, is where ‘soft intel’ is stored; in layman’s terms it may be called rumour and tittle-tattle. The guards now claimed that they had intelligence that Don was a in fact a member of the IRA but they had overlooked facts that Tom Creed was quick to pick up on: none of this so-called intelligence had emerged until after Don’s arrest; and that the ‘various sources’ were in fact the drunken utterances of one person travelling the bars of Passage West. The barrister’s finger then jabbed in the direction of the prosecutor as with every word he said: ‘Do . .not . .take . .liberties. .with. .this . .man!’ It so unsettled the prosecutor, who hadn’t seen Tom Creed so vehement before, that several times during the trial she would defer to him before continuing with a line of questioning until he was moved to utter that he was there to act for the defence and not to advise the prosecution. The attempted legal ambush had failed and failed badly but it did not mean that there wouldn’t be another before the trial was finished.