Murder at the Cottage | Sky

That's one part of it.

The Martin O Sullivan statements are the other half.

It's too strange that they both agree and happened right in about the murder yet not investigated at all.

What is the source for one of the people in the house stating the door was opened and shut at 7am? DPP report does not reference this and indicates his movements can be accounted for which casts serious doubt on MF early accounts reliability. If we was out thumbing on the road then are you saying he was unsuccessful, back in for breakfast and ended up getting dropped home in the afternoon? If the above is correct it would lean towards MF being correct in her original assertions that it was him in all 3 sightings. I would be surprised that the DPP report, which I hold as the most factually correct interpretation of all the evidence, would not mention this testimony of a door being opened in the AM.

Her husband said in his police interview she originally intended to return on Christmas Day. Which would be impossible as there are no flights out of Ireland on Christmas Day.

I’ve come across it in a few places but Michael Sheridan in ‘The Murder of Sophie’ names the person as Tony Doran, he said he met Ian in the house next morning at around 11am but that he had heard someone leaving around 7.30, he hadn’t heard anyone coming back. Ian talks about leaving the house but wasn’t sure what time or what he was planning on doing in the West Cork podcast.

His cartoons were about bondage. Seemingly one of the documentaries she made was about bondage.

I've often wondered would a person of Sophies profession and means have owned and used a camera or video recorder at this time with records of who she spent time with, where she visited etc

If IB was into bondage it would be being cited as more definitive proof he was guilty.

This inability to selectively quote is a complete pain. But here we go:

1. The murder happened at the coldest time of the year and the nights were clear, temperatures were either below or barely above a typical refrigerator. The state pathologist felt it was unnecessary to got to the scene but the garda in charge felt differently. I can see both sides, neither suggest any advantage for or against a conspiracy. If the pathologist didn't go to the scene the same people would be here arguing that the gardai moved the body deliberately to prevent the pathologist seeing it in situ and perhaps coming to conclusions they didn't like. The only argument made by the senior gardai from Dublin was that is was against the dignity of the victim to leave the body there and it was handier for the pathologist to get to Cork University Hospital. In general, it seems obvious that the pathologist should see the body as found, they can see if where the blood has congealed under the skin matches the position the body was found in, thereby establishing if it had been moved after death etc. I can see the local garda's point completely, it was out of his control how long it took the state pathologist to get his act together.
2. I've yet to see anything official or reliable to back up the claim that a blue Ford Fiesta was seen driving dangerously near the scene, one article seems to have been in the Daily Mirror in 2014 and suggested it was new information. This article also claimed Sophie was having an affair with another person in the locality, this seems to be a baseless rumour too. The only other mention of it is by Gemma O'Doherty and a single line in an article about an interview with Ian Bailey. Is it possible this is a highly convenient rumour to surface just as IB was taking the High Court action against the state?
3. So the idea was to bribe someone to get a false confession from an innocent man? Why don't they just bribe the guy to make a false statement that IB admitted it? Why go through months of meeting this drug user when they could have just said 'tell us he told you he did it and be on your way'? It makes zero sense unless the gardai genuinely believed IB was guilty.
4. Bandon garda station was flooded at some point, it's likely some evidence was lost in that flood. This doesn't explain the pages torn out of the jobs book but since this happened after the DPP shelved the case and the McNally review, it seems to me it's more likely to be statements reporting innocent people for odd or unusual behaviour that were not relevant to the case. One of the contributors to the documentaries says as much, that people were reporting their neighbours for all sorts of things that were irrelevant to the case.

On point 4, the torn pages from the job book, your explanation makes no sense for multiple reasons.

Also, even if some of the pages contained 'irrelevent' information, they had been in the book of evidence for years and gone through DPP process. Why remove them now? It makes no sense. Is this standard practice when a case is shelved by the DPP that the book of evidence is 'edited'?

From the Irish Examiner:

A total of 139 original statements are missing from witnesses and include original memos of interviews with Jules Thomas and Marie Farrell...

GSOC said their concern is further compounded by the fact that the specific pages missing are from the time when Mr Bailey seems to have first been identified as a potential suspect and as such they are potentially very significant.

It was noted during the review of the jobs books by GSOC that there were a number of issues about the actual records which could not be explained.

Forensic scientist Brian Craythorne found several pages had been removed from the Jobs Book, possibly by cutting with scissors. He found that the front fly sheet, the pages numbered 1 to 7 and pages 10 and 11 were missing.

These included the numbering such as Job number 277 jumping to 288 on the next page but there were no apparent missing pages. A number of pages were glued together with nothing in between them, meaning that the page numberings were also out of sequence.

And let's not forget:

The watchdog also said that due to a lack of cooperation for a number of gardaí it was not possible for it to fully establish some of the details pertaining to the arrests of Ian Bailey and Jules Thomas.

IB started a claim against the state and his solicitors were looking for the garda file and DPP reports for their case. The DPP report was then 'leaked' to the press while the judge had ruled it inadmissible due to it being composed almost entirely of opinion and conjecture rather than fact. The gardai would probably be justified in thinking sensitive elements of the case would have serious repercussions for people who gave information in good faith if it was made public. They may also have included references to local garda informants or methods of gaining intelligence that would compromise other cases. The chances of these pages containing 'Joe and I are thinking of planting evidence at the scene' or 'Myself and Danny falsified a few statements during our lunch break so are due 1 hour overtime' seems a lot less likely.

It wasn't a justification, it was a possible explanation.

There seems to be passing mention of him in episode 7 of the West Cork podcast.