MALCOLM MACARTHUR: THEN AND NOW

• Published date: 20 May 2023
• Publication title: Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland)

With one exception

On the far left of the photograph, we see a boy standing clearly apart from, and some paces behind, the rest of his teammates. He is a handsome boy with hair that is bristle-thick. He is conspicuously wearing a jacket over his football jersey. He is not smiling like the rest. His expression and posture are ambivalent.

The caption at the bottom of the picture identifies the outsider.

M Macarthur.

Malcolm Macarthur had one particular trait that became more and more apparent as I researched The Irish Times podcast series, Gubu, and, subsequently, my book, The Murderer and the Taoiseach. It was that he spent his life as an outsider: as a child, as an adult, always. You never got a sense he belonged anywhere, or with any community.

His family were themselves outsiders. In 1906, his grandparents, who had considerable wealth, decided to leave Scotland - almost on a whim - and bought a large estate and grand house in Co Meath. They had no relatives and absolutely no connection with Meath. Half a century later they were still considered "blow-ins".

Malcolm, born in 1946, had a lonely childhood, minded by the housekeeper at the sumptuous Breemount House, and witness to the increasingly violent rows between his distant, aristocratic parents.

Waning family fortunes meant he did not go to the fee-paying Ampleforth College in England, but to the local Christian Brothers School in Trim, which had no pretensions to be anything other than ordinary. Macarthur was shy and bookish, did not like sport, and though well-liked by his classmates was never one of them. He took a degree in economics, in the small Davis University in California in the late 1960s. He was an outsider there too, a bow-tie-wearing dandy with a cultivated accent among the longhaired hippies and pot smokers.

Aristocratic life

After his father died in 1971, he inherited a considerable sum, equivalent to more than €1 million today. It allowed him to live the dissolute, aristocratic life he yearned for without having to work.

Macarthur hung around fashionable restaurants and bars, socialised with a bohemian set, presented himself as a kind of Oxbridge authority on astrophysics (which he wasn't), and went full flâneur in his flamboyant clothing choices, with silk cravats, polished brogues and tweeds. Some people were even of the view that he was titled.

He certainly stood out but, at the same time, he never really fitted in. Those who encountered him described him as distant, eccentric...