Saoirse McGarrigle: The day I confronted paedophile Michael Shine

Saoirse McGarrigle

JOURNALISTS DEAL IN facts. Most don’t like to admit that they get things wrong, but I must admit that I was almost fooled by Michael Shine.

Most Irish people will, hopefully, never see inside the Central Criminal Courts, so I will paint a picture for you of how it looks beyond the steps at Parkgate Street, near the Phoenix Park. 

When you go through security and metal detectors there is a large open-plan area. The easiest way to describe it is if you can imagine that the country’s biggest court complex is a hotel, this space serves as a giant lobby area, while the courtrooms are the hotel rooms located on different floors above it.

At around midday on 23 February 2019, I was sitting on a bench in this vast ‘lobby’ area.

I was working for a daily newspaper at the time and while I hadn’t covered the trial I had been sent to the courts Dublin 8 to cover the sentencing hearing. In other words, I was there on the day that he would finally be put behind bars.

The hearing was due to kick off at 1pm, so I had some time to spare, and I spent it with my head buried in my laptop reading back over old stories about this man, who by now most considered some sort of Doctor Evil.

I was distracted when an older man dressed in an anorak shuffled up beside me. I rushed to make space for this pensioner to sit down beside me.

He thanked me and I went back to reading.

A courthouse is a bizarre microcosm of everyday life. The lawyers are easiest to spot. They seem to follow a strict uniform of black formal wear, the only blast of colour is a crisp white shirt. The younger they are, the bigger the mountain of files they are expected to haul around.

There are also the devastated mothers, those who want to be anywhere other than here, as they watch their child tread the tightrope between a probation report and a seat in the back of a prison van.

But the most intriguing are the ones you just can’t quite fit into any box. This old man in his anorak that ‘had seen better days’, as my own mother might say, was a misfit.

He had made his way to the seat as though he once had a reason to walk with purpose, but he now had a mobility issue.

Why was he there? I wondered if he might be there to give evidence in a trial, maybe he was the victim of a violent mugging. The list of possibilities was endless, but I snapped back to reality when people started to move all at once.

There’s no formal indication that a hearing is about to begin. Nobody rings a bell. There just seems to be this sudden shift when all those waiting anxiously outside simultaneously push towards the door and know: It is time.

For Michael Shine it was his time. 

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I gathered my bits and pieces and joined the surge of people filing past uniformed gardaí into the courtroom.

A sentencing hearing is a little different to other days. For journalists, it’s the first time that you can, as editors say, ‘add a little colour’. What’s the defendant (now convicted) wearing? Did he/she bring a bag with them ready for their first night in prison? Do they hang their head in shame or stare vacantly across the room?

It was only as I opened my notebook that I saw that old man sitting in the box. He hadn’t been mugged. He wasn’t a victim. He was the Doctor Evil that we were all there to write about. I was hit with a rush of guilt. I had made the ignorant assumption that this man, with his pronounced shuffle, was a vulnerable person.

But while I felt guilt, he didn’t. It was one of the first things that Judge Martin Nolan pointed to. During the short sentencing, which lasted just five minutes, Judge Martin Nolan also told the court that during the course of a four-week trial Shine showed “no expression of remorse whatsoever”.Shine was sentenced to prison for four years for sexually assaulting seven boys over three decades.

Pat Cusack punched the air and the emotion in the room was palpable. As an 11-year-old patient, Pat Cusack was abused by Shine in 1974.

But in 2019, Pat Cusack was a 56-year-old father of eight.

I had fallen for Shine’s act. This was no small, feeble old man. This was a devious and depraved doctor who had preyed on children.

He didn’t look like the monster, who was set to be ‘caged’, as I and other journalists would type later that day.

The truth is, men like Shine, don’t always look like how we expect. We cannot pick them out of a crowd as ‘the monster’. They may wear a suit or even surgical scrubs as they save lives in an operating theatre. They may exchange pleasantries with a stranger in a waiting area.

Six years later, I would come face-to-face with Shine once again.

This time I had wrangled my way inside his Ballsbridge, Dublin 4 apartment for an interview.

When we locked eyes, his first comment was, “Oh you are beautiful”. It seemed he had come to his own conclusions about me based on one first glimpse.

It was on the tip of my tongue to say “shut up, you creep”, but I had made it into his living room, so I fought hard to bite my tongue. Now when I listen back to the recording of our exchange, I cringe as I hear myself giggling “thank you”.

It was much easier for him to presume at first glance that I was a kind, gentle stranger who had come to visit and listen to his tales of heroism treating war wounds in what was then known as Biafra. 

This made it all the more important to ensure that he understood that I was in fact, a journalist, something which I repeated to him, and yet he agreed to proceed with an interview.

But I did, nonetheless, let him rabbit on about his missionary work. The longer I kept him talking the better. The more he had to say the more likely he was to answer questions.

As I looked around his apartment, I could see half empty bottles of Lucozade dotted around the place and the remnants of bacon and cabbage that had begun to curl at the edges in a tin foil container that looks to have been delivered to his home in Ballsbridge.

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If I had been transported into his tiny kitchen without any other realisation of why I was there, I would be forgiven for thinking that it was a visit to a sick elderly relative who relied on sugary drinks to keep weight on their ailing bones.

After 10 minutes of the easy questions, I felt he had warmed up, and it was time to move on to the questions that I had come to ask: “What did he have to say to the men that he had abused?” 

The mask slipped.

He was no longer a feeble old man taking a trip down memory lane. He flipped a switch and went on the attack. These men were only after his money, he insisted.

It would have been one thing to dig his heels in and reaffirm his innocence, but to suggest that it was all about money was vile.

I brought up the case of Pat Cusack – the man he claimed to have “no memory whatsoever” of during the 2019 criminal trial.

But now, he suddenly remembered that 11-year-old boy. He not only remembered him, but he claimed to have “cured him”.

“What I was convicted of – he was somebody I treated when he was 11 and I cured him,” he said.

He was inadvertently contradicted his own testimony. 

After that interview, many people asked me if I believed he was fully compos mentis. Was he that feeble old man who didn’t know what he was talking about and couldn’t remember any of the boys whose childhoods he had ravaged?

Michael Shine is not a weak elderly man who does not know what he is saying. He is a criminal who puts on a mask with the same ease as he slipped on a surgical gown during his decades long career in medicine.  

Now when I think of Michael Shine, I see a powerful surgeon with a knife in his hand and an 11-year-old boy with recurring abdominal pain.

I no longer see that old man dressed in an anorak, shuffling over to a bench to take the weight off.

Tomorrow, you will read the story of another victim, who has bravely decided to tell his story for the first time following the government’s announcement of an inquiry into Shine’s criminality and how he was enabled for decades.

The survivor will recall meeting Shine striding in sports wear through Herbert Park not all that long before I was duped by that same man, with a polite disposition and pretending to be bent with age.