The internet was in its infancy when John Gilligan was jailed. Twitter, Facebook and iPhones were more than a decade away. But within an hour of his release from jail yesterday all of those technologies spread word of the criminal's first interview since autumn 1996.
At that time he was in the Netherlands on the run from gardaí investigating Veronica Guerin’s murder, of which he was later acquitted.
The 61-year-old has since tried hard, on his way in and out of court down the years, to present the persona of a happy-go-lucky working-class lad whose resilience the system could not break. His constant legal challenges to the State's criminal and civil cases against him have been designed to show official Ireland that despite his background and minimal schooling he is just as clever as "they" are.
Inarticulate
But in a two-minute interview on the doorstep of his brother's house in Clondalkin, Dublin, yesterday, Gilligan came over as inarticulate, rambling and flustered.
He had been pursued by some reporters in cars and on motorbikes from Portlaoise Prison to his brother’s house, his first port of call after almost 17 years locked up. Gilligan stood in the porch and spoke briefly to the small group of journalists outside.
“I had nothing to do with Veronica Guerin’s murder because, like, I tried to get me trial on three times,” he said, the latter a reference to a charge of assaulting Guerin he faced at the time of her murder.
“We tried to get that case on three times, demanded it, because I was going to win. I couldn’t wait to get that trial on in Kilcock and the State kept putting it off. Ms Guerin, the Lord have mercy on her, she never wrote one word about me, nothing.”
Asked if he accepted he assaulted Ms Guerin, he replied: “No, I didn’t. And I seen people say I admitted it, I did no such thing.
"And another thing is: one of the reasons why I didn't get convicted in the Special Criminal Court of the murder was people said I threatened the lady. But in them days there was no throwaway phones, they were all bill phones to your landline. For five days [during the murder trial] we asked the prosecution, please produce a phone bill and we will know where these threats came from – if he was roaming, if he was in Ireland or in another jurisdiction. And the prosecution didn't produce any because there was none because I never made any phone calls."
He denied the allegation that he had threatened Ms Guerin by pledging to rape her son. “Not a chance in a million years,” Gilligan said.
He confirmed Ms Guerin had called to his house near Enfield, Co Meath, but when pressed as to what had occurred he sought to draw the conversation to a close, saying he had been cleared of ever harming her.
When asked what his long-term plans were, he replied: “Me plans are going in to have another beer.”
