Despite a few temporary breakups over the course of three decades, Jules Thomas was with Bailey up until April, when she told the Irish Mail on Sunday, “After 25 years I am sick and tired of banging on with this; it’s been just awful—all that stuff in print, the press attention, the photographers, everything.” Moreover, her family had refused to visit when Bailey was around, and she was looking forward to seeing them at her beloved West Cork home more often.
That being said, Thomas added, “I am convinced of his innocence, always have been and that it was a stitch-up by the guards from the beginning.” She would have broken up with him sooner, but “if I had left him in the middle of all that it would have looked like he did it, so I just gritted my teeth.”
She told the Mail on Sunday this month that she and Bailey talked to Jim Sheridan extensively for Murder at the Cottage—and that the director had told her Bailey never mentioned how she too was arrested twice. “It was horrific, their interrogation, and unbelievable how Ian would not have said anything about my arrests,” Thomas said. “But that’s so typical of him, he has to be the central character with no thought at all of what I was suffering.”
While testifying in Dublin’s High Court in 2014 in the course of his lawsuit against police, Bailey admitted to having been “seriously violent” toward Thomas on three occasions, most recently in 2001, after which he pleaded guilty to a charge of assault. “I don’t know what I can say about that other than to say it’s to my eternal shame,” he said.