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Nailing the institutional culprits, ignored by Ireland’s deficient media By Irvin Muchnick In Ireland’s public square, I now ask yet again: “Why was Gibney living in Florida and who sponsored his Green Card?” The long-elusive goal of a second prosecution of at least some of George Gibney’s countless alleged sexual abuses of young swimmers now seems imminent.  The next stage is whether the media in Ireland deign to take the story deeper. Custom and practice suggest the prognosis is not promising. Mark Horgan’s podcast Where Is George Gibney? did succeed in notching Gibney. Unfortunately, a lot of important stuff has been either left on the cutting-room floor or ignored entirely. Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s remarks that it was this series that got this over the top spiked decades of advocacy by, among others, swimming star Gary O’Toole and journalists Johnny Watterson and Justine McCarthy. ‘Prime Time’ had questioned Gibney in a California car-park as long ago as 2006 As a result of Horgan’s 2020 series, which was broadcast by the BBC and Second Captains, fresh faces came forward to gardaí, grounding an indictment drawn up by the Director of Public Prosecutions for 78 counts of sexual assault and one of attempted rape. In October of last year the Irish embassy in Washington, D.C., submitted an extradition request. And on 1 July this year,  the one-time Olympic swimming coach was fitted for handcuffs and return, more than 30 years after his first prosecution got scuttled by now-discredited statute-of-limitations case-law. For the survivors of the newly alleged incidents, there is palpable relief. A trial will also be hygienic for the entire community of Gibney victims – some of them now dead, of whom at least one was by suicide. As the grimly cynical maxim goes, no well-connected predator meets his match without the emergence of “a live boy or a dead girl.” One live boy, Chalkie White, was a root whistleblower whose testimony now reaches back to events more than a half century ago. Almost incredibly, and in an illustration of the depraved reach of the republic of Gibneystan, another accuser of serial molestation was White’s sister Loraine Kennedy – alleging abuse when she was nine years old. I had the privilege of dining with that grand lady, in Dublin months before her 2019 death from cancer. Generally I prefer the term “predator” to “paedophile” which often gets appropriated by homophobes. But sometimes the shoe fits snugly. In my 2016-17 Freedom of Information Act case over whether Gibney’s privacy rights were outweighed by the public’s interest in cracking open his American immigration file, US federal judge Charles R Breyer delivered the defining analysis. “I have to assume”, Breyer said, “that if somebody has been charged with the types of offences that Mr Gibney has been charged with, the United States, absent other circumstances, would not grant a visa. We’re not a refuge for paedophiles”. Breyer’s utterance from the bench, in combination with the most basic artificial intelligence mashup via Google, will probably tell you more about where the Gibney narrative needs to turn in 2026 than the entirety of the mainstream Irish coverage of scandalously delayed — and so justice-denying — court proceedings. More than a decade ago, the headline over my first blog post on this sordid subject posed basic questions that remain not only unanswered but also unexplored, in both Ireland and the US. On the Irish side, this is sadly characteristic of the national style in the agonising space of historical abuse in high places. A victory lap by the Irish Times crowd always seems to replace the incommodious task of shining the klieg light of accountability on sports overseers, law enforcement and governments. In Ireland’s public square, I now ask yet again: “Why [Was] George Gibney – No. 1 At-Large Paedophile in Global Sports – Living in Florida? And Who Sponsored His Green Card?”. The BBC, Irish Times and RTÉ avoid contemplating the larger lessons and squash offshoot stories. They do not foster the investigative journalism that would generate challenging lessons In the generous interpretation, the podcast’s confinement by the parameters of its brand of storytelling precluded such a deep dive. In the less generous interpretation, the terms of engagement for underwriter BBC – like those of the Irish Times, RTÉ and many other institutions with the resources to do better – annul contemplation of  how hard cases make for larger lessons. They squash offshoot stories by atomising and sentimentalising core narratives. They do not foster the investigative journalism that could render our takeaways less domesticated, more explicit and more challenging. ***** To date, the defunct alternative site Broadsheet.ie (whose archives, happily, can still be accessed), starting in 2016, and Village, starting with my piece here in 2022, remain the only Irish outlets that have shared with news consumers certain relevant facts surrounding the determining official lapse in the Gibney saga. That would be the 1994 three-justice Supreme Court technical ruling which effectively scuttled Gibney’s 27-count indictment. One of the judges was Susan Denham, later, of course, the Chief Justice. She is the sister of Patrick Gageby, who was Gibney’s barrister. 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. In