Those of us too young to remember the aristocratic Malcolm Macarthur’s criminal spree in 1982 may well have learned about it via contemporary Irish literature. A cultivated socialite whose days were devoted to refined leisure and the life of the mind, at the age of 37, Macarthur found himself in deep financial trouble. Frantic at the prospect of having to work for a living, he hatched the unlikely plan of carrying out an armed robbery. To do this, he would need a car and a gun. In the course of procuring these, he murdered – brutally, senselessly – two young people: a nurse named Bridie Gargan and a farmer named Dónal Dunne.
When the gardaí arrested Macarthur at the Dublin home of Ireland’s attorney general, Patrick Connolly, where he was hiding out as a guest, the scandal almost toppled Charles Haughey’s government. It also birthed an enduring acronym, “Gubu” (grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented), and fuelled conspiracy theories concerning the workings of class and power in a nation whose deep political corruption had not yet been exposed.
