I love the podcast, it's a fantastic and sets out a very fragmented story well.
There is so much of Marie Farells' story that makes little sense to me. I know Schull well, I remember the ice cream parlour, if not her dress shop. Schull is much more chi chi now but back then, the only clothes available were hippy wear and sturdy polyester and the idea that a Parisian woman would be browsing in a Marie's clothes shop is a little odd.
That any shopkeeper on the Saturday before Christmas had time to glance out the window and notice a foreign looking man, in a long black coat and beret seems fanciful. (She only needed to add a string of onions around his neck and he could have been fresh out of an episode of 'Ello, 'Ello).
I also have problems with the Kilfadda Bridge sighting. I live on a similar boreen and sometimes walk my dogs at night because of the lack of light pollution from houses or streetlights, you can see cars coming from miles away. If you didn't want to be seen, as presumable you wouldn't if you'd just murdered someone, there is loads of time to hide before the driver gets close enough to see you.
It is easy to mock the Guards but it's sort of like mocking your office first aider for not being able to preform open heart surgery. They weren't used to dealing with serious crime or any crime really. Schull is too small to have a social welfare (or dole) office, so people used to sign on at the Garda Station and that was their main job of the week. They also used to drive around checking on vunerable people, for example there was an elderly woman, living alone in a house without electricity outside the village and they'd pop in to have a cup of tea and see if any turf needed bringing in from the shed. It was about as far from Law & Order as it was possible to be.
Furthermore, the extent to which the locals won't talk about anything except the weather is hard to overstate. The culture of looking the other way is impossible to explain to anyone from a city or even a large town. That must have made investigating a murder almost impossible.
Bailey is an awful man but I don't think that he's a murderer. There probably should be a crime of pushing yourself forward in a murder Investigation and wasting the time of those trying to do their job and he's most certainly guilty of that. To anyone else, his social exclusion since Sophie's murder would have been punishment enough but he's enjoyed his notoriety and perceives himself to be a local celebrity, if not hero.
I think it's ironic that two blow-ins created so much sound and fury to draw attention to themselves that they enabled a local to quietly get away with murder.