I'll admit I find MF the fascinating one in all this because she inserted herself voluntarily into the case when she started to make the anonymous phone calls to police about seeing a man near Kealfadda Bridge at night -- the gardaà were only able to exert pressure on her to make a false identification with IB (and link up the sighting with the man she said she'd seen outside her shop when Sophie was inside) because she repeatedly put herself forward in the first place, and then messed up by calling from her landline after calling twice from public phoneboxes, allowing the police to identify her.
I've yet to hear an account or interview that probes her on her psychological processes when she started to phone the guards as 'Fiona' -- did genuinely see a man by the bridge and think her sighting was key to solving a murder, or was she a total fantasist? Did she have some deep-seated guilt about the outing with the other man and have a need to make a kind of 'confession' about it, to the police if not to her husband, and that drove the anonymous calls?
She would have had to tell police there was someone in the car with her, too, because they wouldn't have known -- and in fact her statements say that she left home at 10 pm in her own van, saying she was going out with friends, and drove in convoy to Goleen with the other man in his car after they met in a hotel car park, and then both went in his car to Barleycove beach.
Was her marriage unhappy? She denies having an affair with the man she met that night, though she says they'd had a serious relationship before she married and almost lived together, but they drove out to an isolated beach late at night in December in his car and stayed there for some time. They could have been having sex. But she says they then drove (in his car?) several times between Goleen and Toormore, which suggests some kind of serious conversation, or distress, or not wanting to part? It was on one of those drives she says she saw the man by the bridge, but it's not clear whether she was in her car or his, or why they kept driving back and forth along a not particularly easy winding rural road in the middle of the night in midwinter if there wasn't something quite serious going on...?
I've also wondered about how she talked in interviews about the period when the police, it seems, were being nice to her she talked about having 'my gardaà life' and 'my normal life', had a special mobile given her by them, and at one point said one of them (Fitzgerald?) was like her 'best friend' even leaving aside the various strings pulled on her and her family's behalf.
Was she simply a lonely, unhappy woman longing for a bit of attention and protection, from whoever? She also apparently told a Garda Ombudsman that she reason she left the UK, where she'd been living for years before moving to Schull, because her husband's sister had reported her for benefit fraud, and she was being asked to repay £27000.
(I assume she and her husband rented the shop and icecream parlour, and having a stall at the Coal Quay market in Cork doesn't suggest wealth, but the house they owned in Schull was large and quite glossy -- this is it, I think, from when they put it on the market before they moved away again:
www.daft.ie/for-sale/detached-house-11-ard-cleire-ardmanagh-schull-co-cork/3270460 )
One of the things her special relationship with the gardaà also supposedly covered over was her husband shooting a warning shot at a local oddball who was apparently stealing Marie's underwear out of a shed where they kept their tumbledryer.
Which makes her husband sound quite volatile, and as though he, or both of them, had a complicated or hostile relationship with his family, if it was his sister who reported them for benefit fraud in London...?
Anyway, MF fascinates me. Maybe in part because Ian Bailey is such an obvious eccentric a drunk given to wearing costumes and assuming Irish names, calling entire pubs to attention to subject them to his terrible poems, a natural limelight grabber with no sense of how he was viewed by other people etc but MF seems like a very ordinary, mousy, rather harassed little woman.