book review with constant weader

This week's title: Immaculate Deception by Jim Gallagher, Merlin Publishing, 2009.

Jim Gallagher's hatchet job on the claims of Achill Island visionary Christina Gallagher to be receiving personal visits from the Blessed Virgin Mary, is well worth another look with the passing of a few years since its original publication date.

The book is essentially a weaving together of attack articles Mr Gallagher first published about Miss Gallagher in the Sunday World newspaper.
Since then Christina's loyalists have not totally abandoned her and nor have students of the nature of reality like me entirely lost interest. (My own conspiracy theory du jour for Christina is that she has currently reinvented herself as internet loon prophet the self styled Maria Divine Mercy, a not for profit Prophet, if you believe her publicity handouts.)
As a distillation in narrative form of Jim Gallagher's merciless newspaper attempts to blow Christina Gallagher out of the water, the book, like the articles, attempts a systemic debunking of her as a visionary. It was first published in book form in 2009 but even today it still has merit and is still relevant.
Caveats: His book may be seen as a personalised and vitriolic attack on Christina Gallagher. It is these. But it is more.  It may also be seen as an exculpatory piece, intended to justify The Sunday World newspaper's three year long campaign to ruin her. It is this too. But it is more.
The book is billed by its publishers as "the shocking true story," and the truth is in here somewhere I'm sure.
I'm just not sure that the Sunday World ever really found the smoking wafer it insists it has found. Nor am I sure that the evidence as presented in Jim Gallagher's book justifies his trial by newspaper attempts to ruin a private citizen.
If you read Jim Gallagher's book I think you will end up asking yourself not just about Christina's integrity but about Jim Gallagher's and the Sunday World's integrity as well.
The book is fascinating because all these moral contradictions become relevant in any consideration of it.
Presumably Jim Gallagher is no relation of the reputed visionary Christina Gallagher although the coincidence in last name's creates a little confusion for the unwary reader.
The book features a clear narrative overview of Christina and her claims even if the author seems at times to prevent our access to any details that might happen to be in the visionary's favour.
There is a dissatisfying reliance on sources who are permitted to remain anonymous. Jim Gallagher tells us how decent his sources are, how brave and how sincerely religious.
But he would say that, wouldn't he.
And if his sources are so decent, brave and religious why wouldn't they have the most basic common brave religious decency to set their names to their slanders?
I reckon fully ninety percent of the allegations in this book are attributed one way or another to supposedly real individuals whose identities remain Jim Gallagher's little secret.
This stuff would not pass in a court of law where witnesses have to stand over their testimony particularly when the reputation of another human being is being dragged through the mud.
And that's the problem with this book.
Can we sincerely believe Jim Gallagher is on the side of the angels, genuinely trying to shut down a fraudulent visionary in order to protect the elderly and vulnerable who according to him would otherwise be ripped off by her?
Or is it more likely that the Sunday World having come to the conclusion that Christina Gallagher was not quite oxo, decided to label her as a fraud in order to sell a few newspapers, at a time when their title was running up hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, soon to be written off by collapsed gangster banks?
I'm asking the question.
Even if Christina is doing a fakey poohs with her visions, who is the bigger criminal here? Consider it! Independent Newspapers which owns the Sunday World has just had at least five hundred million dollars of its loan debts cancelled by banks recently nationalised by Prime Minister Enda Kenny. (Yes the same Enda Kenny who closed the Vatican Embassy and legalised abortion and spent at least a further 30 billion dollars of public money bailing out the drug dealing, people trafficking, child abusing, terrorist IRA mafia controlled Anglo Irish Bank since renamed Irish Bank Resolution Corporation.) Independent Newspapers which owns the Sunday World is itself owned by three billionaires, Tony O'Reilly, Denis O'Brien and Dermot Desmond who are political patrons of Enda Kenny.
And through the cancellation of Independent Newspapers debts by banks that Enda Kenny has decided you and I now must own, you and I are effectively paying the three billionaires gruff's debts to the newly nationalised banks! Yes. The impoverished citizenry of the Republic of Ireland are paying the newspaper business debts of the three billionaires gruff who are themselves political supporters of Prime Minister Enda Kenny and his Fine Gael party. You couldn't make it up. But it ain't no fairy tale.
If Christina Gallagher was the Fakiest Fake from Fakeville, Illinois, going door to door for the rest of her life ripping off pensioners, she still wouldn't have cost the elderly and vulnerable gulpens of Ireland even one tenth of what the ageing brilliantine billionaire playboy proprietors of the Sunday World and their government puppet Prime Minister Enda Kenny have just cost all of us.
Whaddayathink folks?
The problem is that the Sunday World needed her to be guilty more than they needed to get at the truth. I'm suggesting that the pillorying of Christina Gallagher was corporate strategy and not a hunt for the truth.
In his book, Jim Gallagher adroitly describes the mounting tide of what he calls evidence against her. At one stage the Tax Authorities began to investigate her. Then the cops. Then Catholic Church Primate of all Ireland, Cardinal Brady himself.
Each new investigation is trumpeted in Jim Gallagher's book as evidence of mounting public concern about Christina's bona fides.
What he does not make absolutely clear as far as I am concerned, is that each of the three supposed investigations took place solely on foot of allegations made by the Sunday World itself to the three separate investigating bodies. It's as though the Sunday World was trying to use the Tax Authorities, the police and finally Cardinal Brady as proxy armies in their vendetta against Christina. Let's be clear. The Tax Authorities only investigated Christina because the Sunday World had forwarded them a dossier about her, alleging wrong doing. The police only investigated Christina because the Sunday World forwarded them a dossier about her, alleging wrong doing. Cardinal Brady only investigated Christina because the Sunday World directly lobbied him about her, alleging wrong doing.
Three investigations sure. But all the wrong doing was being alleged by the same low rent tabloid near bankrupt newspaper.
The banner headlines with which the Sunday World announced each new investigation, (never quite making it clear enough for my taste that these were investigations launched solely in response to Sunday World dossiers, fabrications and allegations), these banner headlines were never matched afterwards, mind you, with follow up banner headlines announcing that the investigations had led to no charges, no fines, no imprisonment and no sustained connotation or finding of wrong doing against Christina whatsoever by any of the three investigating entities, the police, the tax men, and the Cardinal.
All decided that there was no legal case to answer.
Alone among the tillermen of these three investigations, cops, revenue commissioners and Cardinal, only Cardinal Brady incurred the Sunday World's wrath for not going after Christina hard enough.
But of course Cardinals rarely issue rulings in such matters, preferring over the thousands of years of Church history, to let such visionaries stand or fall on their merits.
When the Sunday World labels Cardinal Brady as Cardinal Sin for not doing what the Sunday World wanted him to do in the Christina case, ie for not fighting the Sunday World's battles for them, it starts to become clear that the motivation of the journalists and editors concerned may not be of the purest.
JIm Gallagher's book covers the Sunday World campaign against Christina without ever specifying or revealing that there was a campaign.
In my view most of Jim Gallagher's thesis is based on guilt by innuendo. This book and his newspaper articles which preceded it, were fishing expeditions, designed to provoke Christina into a courtroom encounter.
References to her as a "roly poly housewife," and to her spiritual advisor Father Gerard McGinnity as "seeming effeminate," are not as convincing (or classy) as the Sunday World might think. Here is the news. Through that accident of life we call Journalism School, I briefly knew several people who went on to become Sunday World contributors and Sunday World editors. (Hi Nickie. Hi Neil.) Everybody made it big except me. For the record, they weren't that good looking and they weren't that macho. I'm just saying is all.

But why were terms like roly poly and effeminate being spitefully and self indulgently applied by an otherwise professional journalist like Jim Gallagher and his employers at the Sunday World, to Christina and her entourage?
These were deliberate provocations because when it came down to it, they couldn't demonstrate or prove malfeasance against her.
And when she didn't jump through the hoop they were holding up and try to sue them, the Sunday World was left floundering.

At that stage if their campaign of vilification wasn't to peter out, as it manifestly was petering out, they needed her in court, one way or the other.

Since the cops, the revenue commissioners and the Cardinal wouldn't play ball as Sunday World proxies in initiating proceedings against her, the Sunday World was trying to lure her into a court room by provoking her into litigation against themselves.

Their plan failed.
Over the course of his book Jim Gallagher produces four main witnesses who do set their names to their accusations and so in my view provide the closest he gets to courtroom standard accusers.
Two of them are an elderly couple who signed over a large sum of money to Christina's charity. Another witness is the man who as an employee of Christina persuaded the elderly couple to give their money to her.
So the star witness for the Sunday World is the guy who actually committed the crime that Jim Gallagher in this book is trying to pin on Christina. And the two best supporting witnesses are the couple that the star witness admits to cheating. These are the best witnesses. You couldn't make it up.
In any event, no charges have resulted from the elderly couple's claims and their money has been repaid to them in full by Christina Gallagher's organisation.
The fourth of Jim Gallagher's witnesses whom I found credible enough, because again at least she was willing to publish her name, was a disgruntled former associate of Christina's who had been on holiday with her and who suggested that Christina had indulged in less than visionary like behaviour while overseas. Her testimony, bitter and vindictive, is in my opinion another fishing expedition laced with innuendo.
It makes Christina look bad. But it doesn't really quite reach the standard of evidence demanded in a court of law to connote fraud. And by now the Sunday World is clearly desperate for Christina to sue them. It's their last play. But she never does.
There is another fascinating side to the Christina story that Jim Gallagher touches upon obliquely. He mentions that in 1998 while in prayer she performed a physical manoeuvre that seemed impossible. This incident was supposedly witnessed by a large number of people. He is very coy in not specifying what manoeuvre she performed while supposedly undergoing some form of spiritual experience.
I have met with a retired senior Irish army officer (at one time the fourth highest in the State) from County Kildare who has insisted to me that on at least one occasion he personally saw Christina levitate several feet into the air. My army source claims he does not however accept Christina as a genuine visionary and says he is of the belief that Christina was able to levitate only through the power of an evil spirit. I write this in cautionary language because if I was to nominate my own scoundrels du jour, I would have difficulty in the moral sense separating some of the entourage clustered around this army officer (they are certainly debased and evil but perhaps without his knowledge) from Christine Gallagher or indeed from the heroes of the Sunday World investigations team. The issue of who exactly you trust arises time and again in any consideration of testimony regarding supposed visionaries. The retired army officer was either lying to me, or else he's mad, or else he genuinely saw Christina Gallagher levitate. In any case if the Sunday World has evidence that she really has levitated, I think we should be told. I've never entirely believed levitation is real and if it's going on I'd like to know. I'd like to know even if it does make the Sunday World's sources seem kind of kooky. For me, the author Jim Gallagher is remiss in not saying exactly what physical manoeuvre "which looked impossible," his own sources say she actually performed. Nor does he explain adequately how certain strongly attested healings attributed to Chrisina's intercession with God, actually took place or were faked or (the third possibility re the supposed healings which Jim Gallagher doesn't touch with a forty foot barge pole) were engineered through the power of evil.
Jim Gallagher's book is going to always be a vital piece of source material on Christina Gallagher but it will never amount to a fair assessment of her.
For all the mud thrown, for all the spying, for all the inducements paid to former associates to give negative testimony, I reiterate, I don't think the Sunday World found the smoking gun.
But yes it looks bad.
I interviewed Christina myself on Achill Island in 1993. I was a student journalist at the time. By coincidence I was attending Journalism School contemporaneously with one Neil Leslie the guy who twenty years later has risen to high things as editor in chief of the Investigations Department at the Sunday World. He has overseen and originated some of the more lurid, and not all that clever, headlines about Christina including the Cardinal Sin one. Incidentally Neil also won the Young Journalist Of The Year Award for our graduating class back in the 1990's. I always maintained that the school gave him the Award more for his working class Dublin accent than for anything else. The irony being that if I'd known they were going to hand out the Young Journalist of the Year award to the guy with the Best Dublin Accent, I would have spoken with a Dublin accent for the year. My fake Dublin accent was a good bit better than Neil's real one. Anyhoo. When I met Christina Gallagher as a student way back then, I had given her a pattycake interview. Much too soft and respectful. I frankly liked her and indeed have never quite managed to bring myself to decisively repudiate her. I'd have to look her in the eyes before I could call her fake now. It wasn't a great interview even if I did raise all the salient issues twenty years ahead of the Sunday World. Ah memories.
Oh.
My blushes.
There was perhaps one item of merit in the pattycake interrogation I gave Christina Gallagher two decades ago. I had put it to her that the Bible warns that many false ones will come making all sorts of claims in the name of the Lord.
And Christina Gallagher had held my gaze and answered: "It becomes clear over time who is true and who is false."



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Glossary
Gulpen: Someone who signs over their house to someone else who claims she's received a message from the Virgin Mary instructing them to do so.



Review first published: 2013.