Obscene: The Dublin Scandal – As grotesque and bizarre as ever

Oh Serial, you have so much to answer for. The podcast that turned a murder case around and helped set a man free after 23 years in prison has spawned a veritable frenzy of miscarriage-of-justice podcasting.

Sometimes these podcasts, like in the case of Serial’s Adnan Syed, cast doubt on a conviction. Others, like in the case of Australia’s The Teachers Pet, cast doubt on another’s innocence. True crime plus podcasts equals audio gold – we’ll never tire of a good murder mystery ripped from the headlines, and it turns out the world is full of them.

In Ireland, the most famous is the subject of Obscene: The Dublin Scandal, a brand new BBC podcast hosted by actor Adrian Dunbar whose drawling, unhurried delivery makes him sound like a jaded private eye from a 1940s black and white movie, but from Fermanagh.

Dunbar wrings all the scandalous juice from it; you can almost hear the arch eyebrow-raise as he drops salacious details. And there’s a lot of almost wryly presented scene-setting for the BBC audience: the things to understand about Ireland, for context, are that it was very cold, that the pope drew a mighty crowd to the Phoenix Park, and that being called cute doesn’t mean you’re pretty.

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This is storytelling at its most crafted – and what a story. Even if you know it all backwards – and The Irish Times’s Harry McGee has already told you about it in his podcast, Gubu – there’s still much worth listening to here. Not just the crazed tale of the man in the tweed and dicky bow in the sweltering heat, and the ambulance that helps the murderer flee the scene, and the botched robbery foiled by a turn in a spiral staircase, and the suspiciously bachelored attorney general, and the suspiciously minted taoiseach, and the acronym that sticks to his shoe, but also some masterful contributions from the likes of Colm Tóibín, Fintan O’Toole, Olivia O’Leary and Una Mullally, bringing the texture and context of 1980s Ireland into vivid life.

The man in the dicky bow, Malcolm Macarthur, is almost lurid in his villainy and the podcast leans into that. We hear about his staring eyes, his unsmiling expression, the cool gaze from a cell that struck fear in a garda, who reported: “I just thought, Yep, evil is in that room.” Macarthur’s victims are not ignored: there’s Bridie Gargan’s gaunt and grieving father, her sister wailing like a banshee, the disillusionment a friend of Donal Dunne expresses after the minutes-long trial – Macarthur was only prosecuted for one of the two murders he confessed to – which landed like a “a slap in the mouth”.

[ The murderer, the attorney general, the taoiseach and the birth of Gubu ]

But this is not a piece of investigative journalism; Obscene draws from the wealth of existing material and reminds us of the questions raised over years of secrets – a whole episode is devoted to Charles Self, a man whose brutal death in the same year as Macarthur’s crimes were committed has never been solved. Was Macarthur ever questioned about this murder? Reports conflict. But nothing really new is unearthed in this retelling, and amid all the voices from both archival recordings and new interviews, the absence of the one voice that can answer all the questions becomes more and more apparent.

Malcolm Macarthur is still alive. And apart from stories about him turning up to scare the wits out of John Banville at one event and have Alan Shatter sign his book at another, we hear little more about the free Macarthur, nor anything from him that might shed light on what happened four decades ago.

Without new information, we are in danger of polishing smooth a brutal, messy story as we tell it again and again, waiting for answers to the many questions that remain. Grotesque. Unbelievable. Bizarre. Unprecedented. And somehow, 40 years on, still unfinished.