On July 22, 1982, a 27-year-old woman from County Meath was attacked in Dublin and died in hospital four days later. Her name was Bridie Gargan. Three days after the attack on her, a 27-year-old man from County Offaly, Donal Dunne, was killed near his home in Edenderry. The man responsible for both deaths was Malcolm Macarthur, 37 years old, from a landowning family in County Meath, who had spent an inheritance and had nothing left to live on.
Macarthur was arrested on August 13, 1982, in a flat in Dalkey, County Dublin, that belonged to Patrick Connolly, the Attorney General of Ireland, a friend who had let him stay without knowing what he had done. The arrest set off a political crisis. Connolly resigned within three days. On August 17 the Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, described the affair in four adjectives, among them "grotesque" and "unbelievable", and their initials became GUBU, the label that came to stand for the whole troubled period of his government.
In January 1983 Macarthur pleaded guilty to the murder of Bridie Gargan and received the mandatory sentence of life imprisonment. The murder charge for Donal Dunne was not proceeded with, and he was never convicted of it. He was released in September 2012, after about 30 years in custody.
Malcolm Daniel Edward Macarthur was born in April 1945. RTE's account of the case describes him as the only son of Irene and Daniel Macarthur, raised on an estate of about 180 acres at Breemount, near Trim, County Meath. The Meath Chronicle later described him as a native of Trim. He came into money in 1974, according to the Irish Examiner, and settled in Dalkey. Mark O'Connell, whose 2023 book A Thread of Violence examines the case, wrote that Macarthur lived on the inheritance and never held a job. RTE says he had no employment and moved in Dublin society while presenting himself as a bohemian intellectual. A review of Harry McGee's 2023 book describes him as the only child of wealthy but distant parents.
By 1982 the money was nearly gone. He had been living in the Canary Islands with his partner and their seven-year-old son. In the Irish Examiner's account he returned to Ireland on July 8, 1982. A review of McGee's book in the Irish Examiner says he had planned a bank robbery and was running out of funds. To carry it out he needed a car and the means to do it. A 2023 podcast discussion carried by The Currency described the question of why he did what he did as a debate that has run since 1982.
Bridie Gargan was 27. She came from a farming family in County Meath, the Meath Chronicle recorded in a remembrance published in July 2022 for the 40th anniversary, and was one of 11 children. She went to the local national school and then to a convent school in Navan, and sat her Leaving Certificate in 1971. She enjoyed traditional music and with friends started a weekly traditional music session in a local pub. Her family kept a regular weekly meal together on Friday evenings. Her parents had died by the time of the 2022 article; her brothers and sisters survived her. Local accounts name different home places for her, among them Dunshaughlin and Curraha, both in County Meath.
Bridie Gargan was attacked in Dublin on the afternoon of July 22, 1982. RTE News, in a report broadcast the next day, put the time at about 4:30 pm and said gardai had begun stopping motorists to find anyone who had seen the man responsible. A Garda superintendent, Jim Brogan, appealed to the public and warned that the attacker might strike again, saying the police had "a good description of the culprit."
A witness to the events of that afternoon did not speak publicly until 2011, when he told the Irish Examiner he was shocked that Macarthur was being released and asked whether he might offend again.
Gargan did not recover. She died in hospital on July 26, 1982, four days after the attack, according to RTE's archive record. The Meath Chronicle's remembrance gives July 22 as the date of her death, but other accounts agree that she lived for four days.
Donal Dunne was 27 and lived at Monasteroris, near Edenderry, County Offaly, the Offaly Express reported, which referred to his relatives only as the Dunne family.
Most accounts place his death on July 25, 1982, three days after the attack on Bridie Gargan; one review of McGee's book says two days.
Gardai connected the two killings. The Offaly Express reported that the evidence tied them together. The first weeks of the investigation, however, did not lead to Macarthur. He was not caught for almost three weeks.
On August 4, 1982, Macarthur was involved in an incident at the home of a retired American diplomat in Killiney, County Dublin, which ended without injury. RTE's account describes it as part of the sequence of events in the days after the Offaly killing. By Ryle Dwyer's reconstruction in the Irish Examiner in 2007, Macarthur telephoned gardai the following day, gave his real name and described the Killiney incident as a prank. TheJournal.ie also reports that gardai received a call saying the whole matter was a prank and that the caller used his own name.
After the Killiney incident Macarthur went to a flat in Dalkey. It belonged to Patrick Connolly, the Attorney General, an old friend of Macarthur's partner. Reports describe the relationship differently: RTE calls Connolly an old acquaintance, TheJournal.ie says he was a friend of Macarthur's from the 1970s, and Magill says Connolly had known Macarthur's partner for about 12 years. Connolly was on the point of leaving on a long-planned holiday. Dwyer's column reports that Macarthur was presented to others as a nephew. Magill places Macarthur's arrival at about August 4.
During those days Connolly and Macarthur were together at a hurling match at Croke Park. Magill reported that they sat in a VIP box and that they reportedly shook hands with the Garda Commissioner.
Detectives led by Detective Inspector Noel Conroy, later a Garda Commissioner, made the arrest, according to Dwyer, and Chief Superintendent John Courtney was the arresting officer. The Offaly Express gives the date as Friday, August 13, 1982, and TheJournal.ie says it was in the evening. Connolly telephoned Haughey, who was on holiday on an island off the Kerry coast, and told him that a close friend faced a charge of two murders; Magill says he did not mention that the arrest had been made in his flat.
Macarthur was taken to the Garda station at Dun Laoghaire. RTE records that he confessed there to both murders. Magill describes a confession of about 20 pages, dictated at the station. The Offaly Express puts it at 21 pages. The Director of Public Prosecutions' office was kept informed during the questioning. On the Saturday, August 14, he was charged with two counts of murder at the District Court in Dun Laoghaire, where the judge appointed a solicitor for him from the legal aid panel. His address was given as the Attorney General's flat. He was held at Mountjoy Prison and never applied for bail, which Magill says was a choice to avoid publicity. The Christian Science Monitor's wire report of August 17 recorded that Irish newspapers and politicians demanded an explanation for why the suspect gave the Attorney General's flat as his home address.
Connolly declined to give gardai a statement the day after the arrest and left for the United States on the holiday he had planned. He telephoned Haughey from London, and he refused at first to come home. When reporters met him on his arrival in New York, he decided the situation was serious. Haughey ordered him back. He returned to Dublin on August 16 and resigned as Attorney General at midnight that night, after a short meeting with the Taoiseach at his home.
Connolly told reporters that he had unknowingly given lodging to a man he regarded as a friend of his family and had offered him a place to stay in Dublin. The Christian Science Monitor, reporting from Dublin on August 18, wrote that the resignation appeared to have eased a political crisis begun by opposition leaders. Magill, in its account, raised questions about the Garda handling of the matter. It said that the Taoiseach, who was also acting Minister for Justice, was not told that the Attorney General's flat had been under observation for several days or that a friend of the Attorney General was suspected of two murders, and that the gardai did not tell him on the evening of the arrest that it had happened in Connolly's flat. Haughey himself, Magill wrote, first heard of the location on the Saturday morning from his private secretary, after a newspaper reported it.
At a press conference on Tuesday, August 17, 1982, Haughey described the events in four adjectives, among them "grotesque" and "unbelievable", whose initials with those of the other two form GUBU. The Dictionary of Irish Biography recounts that the writer Anthony Cronin had suggested those words to him before the press conference, and that about a week later Conor Cruise O'Brien, Haughey's political opponent, rearranged them into the acronym GUBU in his newspaper column. The Meath Chronicle summarized it in 2022 as a term that became shorthand for Haughey's style of politics. In its fuller sense the label spread to cover later controversies of the same government, including the phone-tapping affair.
Dwyer wrote in 2007 that Haughey had also called Macarthur the "right man" in the course of the same period, which Dwyer said prejudged his guilt; reporters were asked to withhold the remark. Magill's chronology records that a remark of this kind was made at the press conference and that the High Court later found no contempt.
The affair ended Connolly's career as Attorney General but was one of several difficulties for a minority government. Magill's timeline of 1982 records a series of crises, among them a roll call in the Fianna Fail parliamentary party in October in which 22 of 81 deputies voted against Haughey. On November 4, 1982, the government fell when the Workers' Party voted against it. The Dictionary of Irish Biography notes that Garret FitzGerald's Fine Gael and Labour coalition then took office.
When the 1982 State papers were released in December 2012, TheJournal.ie reported that the Department of the Taoiseach's files contained no mention of Connolly's resignation, apart from a Cabinet record confirming the salary of his replacement.
The case against Macarthur on the Gargan charge came before the Central Criminal Court in Dublin in January 1983. The defence was led by Paddy McEntee, a senior counsel; the future Minister for Justice Michael McDowell served as junior counsel for the defence. The Director of Public Prosecutions, Eamonn Barnes, directed the prosecution, with Harry Hill as senior counsel. Magill reported that the defence had considered a plea of guilty but insane and abandoned it because the psychiatric reports did not support it.
The hearing lasted only minutes: Magill puts it at about five and Dwyer at about ten. Magill says it began, was adjourned so that the defence could consider new documents, including psychological reports, and that on the next morning Macarthur pleaded guilty to the murder of Bridie Gargan. The presiding judge, identified by Magill as Judge McMahon, declined an offer by the prosecution to read a statement of the evidence and to call the investigating officer, saying the evidence was irrelevant because the sentence for murder was fixed by law. Magill wrote that this refusal added to public anger. In the final minute the defence asked that a psychiatric report stating Macarthur was not a danger to society be entered in the record, and the judge agreed.
The sentence was life imprisonment. Some accounts place the sentence in 1982, but the plea and the sentence belong to the January 1983 hearing.
Macarthur had been charged with two murders, and the second was Donal Dunne's. The Irish Examiner reported in 2012 that the Director of Public Prosecutions did not proceed with that prosecution after he pleaded guilty to the Gargan murder. Another Irish Examiner account says the State entered a nolle prosequi, which ended the case before trial. Macarthur was therefore never tried or convicted for the death of Donal Dunne.
Magill described the course of events this way. When the Dunne count was called, the prosecutor said he did not expect it to proceed. The defence had argued that a fair trial of that charge was not possible because of publicity, and that the evidence was weaker, since Macarthur was the only witness and did not admit that killing. Magill says the Director of Public Prosecutions approved a course in which a murder conviction was secured and the second charge dropped. The Offaly Express quotes Magill's remark that a guilty plea was an "absolute certainty," and adds that the reasons were never fully explained.
The Dunne family were angry about it, and have remained so according to the Offaly Express and the Irish Examiner's review of McGee's book. Magill noted that a private prosecution by the family was a possibility, and reported no such step. In June 2006 the Irish Examiner reported that members of the Dunne family had publicly opposed his release.
In November 2006 McDowell, by then Minister for Justice, was asked about the matter by a student in Edenderry. He told them he was constrained in what he could say because he had been on Macarthur's defence team. He denied that any deal had been done: the Director of Public Prosecutions, he said, decided not to pursue the Dunne case on the evidence then available. He added that he understood the Dunne family's lack of closure.
Macarthur was held at Mountjoy Prison. Magill's account describes him as held in a separate area of the prison, as a model prisoner, and as passing the time teaching other inmates to play pool. In August 2002 RTE reported that the Parole Board had recommended his transfer to an open prison to test his suitability for release; it described him as one of the longest-serving prisoners in the State. McDowell arranged for someone else to consider the report because he had acted for Macarthur at trial. A column by Ryle Dwyer in the Irish Examiner called him a model prisoner for the previous 20 years and argued that the political history of the case had added years to his time in custody.
He was moved to the open prison at Shelton Abbey, County Wicklow. The Irish Examiner says this happened in May 2003; the Meath Chronicle says 2004. In July 2004 the Parole Board recommended for the second year running that he be given a programme of temporary release leading to full release under supervision. The junior minister Willie O'Dea decided against it, and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties criticised the decision. In late 2004 Macarthur began legal proceedings over the failure to release him. By June 2006 his lawyers were seeking judgment in default because the State had not filed a defence, and the State agreed to file one within three weeks.
In December 2006 RTE reported that he was among 230 prisoners granted temporary release over the Christmas and New Year holidays, for a few hours on Christmas Day. In 2011 the Minister for Justice, Alan Shatter, approved a programme of temporary release. The Meath Chronicle reported in November 2011 that a weekend release, his seventh from Shelton Abbey, took him to relatives in south County Dublin and that he was photographed shopping and walking in Dun Laoghaire. A retired detective superintendent from the Garda murder squad said he still considered him "capable of murder."
On Monday, September 17, 2012, Macarthur, then 66, left Shelton Abbey. The Irish Examiner and TheJournal.ie reported on September 19 that he had been granted "reviewable temporary release under the supervision of the Probation Service," which the Department of Justice said was monitored and could end in a return to prison if its conditions were breached. RTE's archive item dates the release to September 19. The Department said the victims' families had been told and that the Minister had been "at all times conscious of the dreadful events of 1982 and of their impact on family members." He had served about 30 years for the murder of Bridie Gargan, one of the longest periods served by any prisoner in the State.
Little has been made public about his life since his release. Reviewing Mark O'Connell's book in the Irish Examiner in June 2023, Gary Murphy wrote that discussing the events of 1982 would breach Macarthur's release conditions, and that the author had met him in Dublin during the Covid-19 period, describing him as an almost stately figure speaking with composure. He was living in the Dublin area at that time.
The affair has produced a body of writing. Mark O'Connell's A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention and Murder was published by Doubleday in 2023 and by Granta Books in a paperback edition. Harry McGee's The Murderer and the Taoiseach: Death, Politics and GUBU appeared the same year from Hachette. McGee and Enda O'Down also made a podcast series in 2022, forty years after the events, in which they spoke to people who had lived through the period, the Meath Chronicle reported. RTE published retrospectives on the case in 2022 and 2023, and the Offaly Express ran accounts of the Edenderry killing in 2020 and 2021.
The phrase GUBU outlasted the case. It remains the standard shorthand in Irish political life for the Haughey governments of 1982 and for the sense of events running out of control.
Proven by his guilty plea: the murder of Bridie Gargan, for which he received a life sentence in January 1983.
Charged, not proceeded with, and not a conviction: the murder of Donal Dunne. A nolle prosequi was entered, and he was never tried. He admitted both killings in his statement to gardai, but the second charge never reached a verdict.
Whether a deal was made. Magill said the Director of Public Prosecutions approved a course that secured the Gargan conviction and dropped the Dunne charge. McDowell said in 2006 that no deal was done and that the decision rested on the evidence. Dwyer wrote in 2007 that there were suggestions of such a deal and did not confirm them. The Director's reasons were never fully explained, according to the Offaly Express.
Whether the State covered anything up. Magill wrote that the Attorney General's involvement fed a public belief in a cover-up, and O'Connell wrote of lingering suspicions that the government had intervened to limit embarrassing revelations. Dwyer called suspicion that gardai made the arrest in the Attorney General's building to embarrass the government mistaken. Connolly was never reported as knowing of the crimes.
Details on which the record varies: the date of Dunne's death (July 25 in most accounts, two days after Gargan in one review); Gargan's home place (Dunshaughlin or Curraha); how Connolly and Macarthur knew each other; the day Connolly left for the United States; the length of the written confession (20 or 21 pages); the year of the move to open prison (2003 or 2004); and the day of release (September 17 or 19, 2012).
April 1945: Malcolm Macarthur is born; he grows up at Breemount, near Trim, County Meath.
1974: comes into an inheritance and settles in Dalkey, County Dublin.
Early 1982: lives in the Canary Islands with his partner and young son.
July 8, 1982: returns to Ireland.
July 22, 1982: Bridie Gargan, 27, is attacked in Dublin.
July 25, 1982: Donal Dunne, 27, is killed near Edenderry, County Offaly.
July 26, 1982: Bridie Gargan dies in hospital.
August 4, 1982: an incident at a home in Killiney ends without injury. Macarthur goes to the Attorney General's flat in Dalkey.
August 13, 1982: arrested at the flat in Dalkey.
August 14, 1982: charged with two murders at the District Court in Dun Laoghaire.
August 16, 1982: Attorney General Patrick Connolly resigns at midnight.
August 17, 1982: Taoiseach Charles Haughey's press conference; the word GUBU follows within about a week.
November 4, 1982: Haughey's government falls.
January 1983: Macarthur pleads guilty to the murder of Bridie Gargan and receives life imprisonment; the Dunne charge is not proceeded with (nolle prosequi).
August 2002: Parole Board recommends transfer to an open prison.
2003 or 2004: moved to Shelton Abbey, County Wicklow.
July 2004: Parole Board recommends temporary release for the second year running; the junior minister declines.
June 2006: High Court proceedings over the delay in release are under way.
November 2006: Michael McDowell denies any deal over the Dunne charge.
2011: Minister Alan Shatter approves a temporary release programme; weekend releases begin.
September 17, 2012: leaves Shelton Abbey on reviewable temporary release under Probation Service supervision.
2022: podcast series on the case; Meath Chronicle and RTE retrospectives mark 40 years.
2023: books by Mark O'Connell and Harry McGee published.