Reaction can determine how the story unfolds

 A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Sometimes life turns on the head of a pin – and the direction you leap will determine so much of your future path from there to the end of time.

That’s best illustrated in a time of crisis when – even if you’re already well used to the public eye – you suddenly find yourself catapulted into the spotlight for a whole different set of reasons.

And it’s how you react to that change of circumstances that will decide how the future pans out from that day forward.

Take the contrasting fortunes of the now-late Bishop Eamonn Casey and the former supermarket magnate Ben Dunne – and how the year 1992 turned out to be their watershed for different reasons.

It was the recent death of the Bishop that brought back headlines and memories of what will be forever known as the Annie Murphy affair – and the shock waves that reverberated across the country when it became known that the Bishop of Galway had fathered a child.

The same year also saw Ben Dunne plumb to his lowest depths when he was arrested for cocaine possession and soliciting a hooker while he as supposedly on a golf holiday in Orlando, Florida.

Different scenarios on either side of the Atlantic – but one shared link; two of the highest profile personalities in the country caught in a most compromising position.

It was, however, their reaction on impact that differed dramatically – because one fessed up and the other fled.

Ben Dunne threw his hands up in a ‘mea culpa’. He checked into a London drug clinic after being ordered by a Florida court to undergo a month’s treatment for cocaine abuse.

But he also made himself available for a whole circus of newspaper, radio and television interviews where he admitted what had happened and threw himself at the mercy of the media, the legal system and his family.

Ultimately of course he did lose control of the family business, Dunnes Stores, but he did rebuild his life without leaving Ireland – enough to end up with perhaps even greater infamy on the basis of his bail-out for the then-Taoiseach Charles J Haughey.

In contrast, Bishop Casey decided not to face a media circus and boarded a flight from Shannon to Central America.

At the same time, a group of his close friends were hastily arranging a press conference in Dublin where he, too, would have admitted his guilt and thrown himself at the mercy of his peers.

The news of his affair came as a huge surprise to even his closest confidantes – but they had quickly come up with a strategy to minimize the impact.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.