“Are you chasing?” the woman reporter opened the car door to inquire.
I was on the phone so she went away, returning a moment later, this time ignoring the phone.
“Are you chasing?” she asked again, a little impatiently.
“No” I replied, finally understanding.
“Would you mind moving your car then. We are chasing." She indicated a number of cars parked in the entrance way to Wheatfield prison car park.
“Why are you doing that?” we asked knowing we sounded terribly naïve.
The woman named a newspaper. “It’s what we do,” she said.
Across the road at the entrance to Wheatfield Prison about a dozen photographers stood, large telephoto lenses concentrated intently on some spot, eastwards unfortunately, in the morning sunlight.
Everyone waiting for Eamonn Lillis, jailed for killing his wife Celine Cawley in 2008, to be released.
There was no conversation. In the distance a car at the end of the driveway moved. Motorised cameras whirred. But it was a false alarm, a supplier’s van.
The gates opened the van left and and the gates closed, nudging a long lens out of the way. Photographers went back to their position staring, silently, at some spot in the distance.
It had been like this at least from 7am.
Some of the media pack had been there overnight, most from early morning, all of us freezing cold.
“What are we going to see here,” the more cynical reporters asked each other.
Nobody seemed sure of the point of it all. As phone batteries ran dangerously low reporters were reluctant to leave the gateway even to cross the road to charge their mobiles in the cars.
Visitors to the prison started to arrive after 9am, some in taxis causing a brief flurry of excitement, but most went up to the Cloverhill end of the prison campus.
A mother with two well-dressed children went into Wheatfield and seconds later the photographers sprang to attention, as if electrified.
In the distance, possibly visible with a telephoto lens, a door had opened and Lillis walked to a waiting car. It was 9.40am on Saturday, one man had waited two days for this shot.
The gate opened, the maroon coloured taxi came rapidly down the driveway, and was immediately surrounded by what is now know as a “media circus”.
Unexpectedly, the taxi turned left towards Parkwest, it had been thought it would turn right for the N4 and the M50 to take Lillis to the airport.
But the women parked in the entrance to the carpark were on it.
Their cars sped off after the taxi, leaving a bemused group of prison visitors staring after them.
“Why?” asked one of them.
