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Last summer the bodies of two Irishwomen, Marion Graham and Cathy Dinsmore, both in their 50s, were discovered in woodland near the Turkish city of Izmir.
The trial is now under way of a man accused of stabbing the two women to death after getting into an argument when he was refused permission to marry Marion's teenage daughter.
What are we going to do if the verdict goes against our expectations, and justice is either not done or not seen to be done? Start a "Boycott Turkey" movement too, to match the "Boycott Mauritius" campaign which erupted after two hotel workers were found not guilty of the brutal murder of Northern Irish honeymooner Michaela McAreavey and graphic pictures of the crime scene were subsequently printed in a local newspaper?
It would certainly be a waste of time if we did. Holidaymakers rarely make ethical choices when heading for the sun. Some travel agents who reported a drop in bookings to Mauritius actually said customers were choosing Dubai instead, obviously oblivious of, or indifferent to, the appalling human rights record of the United Arab Emirates, where consenting gay men have been jailed for up to three years for simply having sex.
Turkey itself has seen thousands of extrajudicial killings in recent decades, but remains a favoured hotspot for Irish holidaymakers nonetheless.
As for our own record of getting justice for victims of terrible crimes, where do you start?
The initial madness seems to have passed now. Cooler counsels have replaced kneejerk calls for national retribution. The question remains why it happened at all. There was an initial urge amongst those uncomfortable with the Boycott Mauritius firestorm to assign the sentiments to momentary loss of senses, but that was too easy. Many of those outraged by the verdict would be as horrified when those believed to have committed heinous crimes get off in Ireland, and just as impatient with the same rhetorical "beyond reasonable doubt" tricks that defence lawyers here deploy for guilty clients.
Instead, what surely fuelled the campaign was the prevailing emotional incontinence which is now such a feature of public discourse. The Irish are not alone in reacting like this -- the mass hysteria which followed the death of Princess Diana proved that much -- but we do seem particularly prone to it. A perpetual orgy of indignation is what happens when emotion replaces reason, and self-indulgence
masquerades as concern. Ireland feels at times as if it's one big amplified version of Liveline, and the mood is only intensified by the smallness of the country. Things feel personal, as they did when the memory of Boyzone's Stephen Gately was traduced by a journalist, and the lengthy eight-week period of the trial, with nightly reports on RTE news, meant there was a long simmering process beforehand.
Tommie Gorman's work was never less than sensitive and balanced, and always gave due weight to the circumstantial nature of the evidence against the two accused. Nonetheless the trial couldn't help becoming a sort of family affair in which everyone looking on from the fringes assumed they had a personal stake in the outcome when in truth they did not, feeling traumatised by something when really they were just sad at the loss of an innocent young life. In that sense, the Boycott Mauritius campaign was our Madeleine McCann moment, when people allowed their justified concern at the failings of foreigners to become a generalised anger against a whole country.
The real danger is when this emotionalism becomes politicised. Former GAA president, now Fine Gael MEP, Sean Kelly had perhaps the fact he is a family friend to justify his decision to sign the Facebook page demanding "no Irish should visit" Mauritius; but the Tanaiste had less excuse when refusing a direct opportunity to distance the Government from the calls to avoid the island, saying only that was up to each individual to decide. Well, of course it is. So is each voter's stance in any referendum on gay marriage, but Gilmore still manages to express a personal opinion on the matter.
As for the North's Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, his intervention was the most flabbergasting of all. He popped up on Morning Ireland to declare not only that the Mauritians had mishandled this case, but that the verdict of the jury itself was "perverse"; explicitly demanding not merely a review of the case, but a "retrial".
It was left to former justice minister Michael McDowell, on News at One, to remind McGuinness that a verdict is not perverse simply "because he disagrees" with it -- as, he added incisively, the Sinn Feiner should be "first to understand", considering the republican movement's fractious relationship with Irish and British courts.
Whatever right to occupy the moral high ground we might have had was undermined by the clumsy intervention of a man who not only faces the possibility of a police investigation into his own past once the announced criminal investigation into Bloody Sunday gets under way, but whose murderous comrades managed to snaffle countless equally perverse 'Get Out of Jail Free' cards by exploiting the very same legal arguments that worked in Mauritius.
The least McGuinness could have done was not throw fuel on the fire. Instead he twice on Morning Ireland played the jingoistic card by referring to the disquiet at the acquittals felt by people on "the island of Ireland".
Then he got oddly cagey when asked directly whether he would "be happy to have the PSNI involved" in any review of the case. He took refuge in some vague formula about the possible working together of the "gardai and PSNI", thereby giving precedence to the police force of a country in which he does not live, any more than did Michaela McAreavey, whilst relegating to sidekick status the one police force over which he does hold responsibility. Who really cares about observing petty cross-border niceties and massaging republican prejudices at a time like this?
