On Trust in the Media

Sarah McInerney, talented columnist and rising RTÉ star, uncharacteristically missed an open goal in her column in yesterday’s Sunday Times. “Forgotten people fired up by out-of-touch press” was the headline on the column, and it seemed that McInerney was about to do what the Irish media are generally loathe to do, which is turn the spotlight on themselves.

Ireland is a very small country and, in a small field like journalism, you have to be careful about whose toes you tread on. This was always true, but it’s especially true now, as the media struggles for existence in the face of the all-conquering World Wide Web.

McInerney’s piece opens by remarking on US riot police shooting at journalists and then draws closer to home by writing of former journalist Boris Johnson’s disdain for a free press in what was once Great Britain. She wrote of the current President of the United States’s often-repeated assertion that the press is out of touch, and went on to examine if that is true in the Irish context. And here, sadly, Aughrim was lost.

McInerney cites two examples of the Irish media being out of touch. The first is the public anger at water charges bubbling over in 2014, which McInerney writes was not covered by the media because they were unaware of it, and the second is a list of influential Irish media people on Twitter that was published last week, of which McInerney notes 75% are white men.

Water charges. A Google Trends search for “water charges” in Ireland, from 2004 to yesterday, can be broken down geographically. This is what it looks like.

So we can see that water charges were very dear to the hearts of people in Lucan, Dublin, Limerick and Cork. The rest of country - meh.

By means of geographical comparison, we can do a search for “rugby”.

Everybody in Ireland is interested in rugby, and this interest peaks every four years, in keeping with the cycles of the Rugby World Cup. The rugby team gets the nation’s attention.

And finally, again for comparison, a search for hurling:

The hurling search is interesting for the absence of Dublin in first place. First place in the hurling searches is Thurles, County Tipperary. Dublin, despite its demographic advantage, is back in the chasing pack.

The point of all this is: water charges have been a huge issue in Lucan since Joe Higgins was elected in 1997, and a big issue in Dublin over the same time. Outside of those areas, nobody gives a toss about water charges.

Therefore, in identifying water charges as a hidden issue for the Irish nation, McInerney herself commits the sin she is here to condemn – not knowing the concerns of the people.

The influential journalist list is a bottle of smoke. It’s a good idea with any survey of this kind to consider how the runners and riders are scored. What is the fundamental unit of influence? If distance is measured in metres and volume in litres, what is influence measured in? The gasbag, perhaps? Does this gasbag unit increase in a linear, logarithmic, or exponential fashion? A brief glance at that influencer lists suggests this list was very useful in gaining its publisher publicity, and in no way otherwise was it of any merit. So that’s two swings, two misses for McInerney.

In his famous essay about the New Journalism, Tom Wolfe wrote often about the need for journalists to leave the newsroom and go out and meet actual people, to ask them about their lives and then return and type it all up. To what extent does the Irish media do that? To what extent do the journalists pound the streets and listen to the people?

For instance: it is a truism in Irish politics that blow-ins do not, and can not, get elected. What, then made the good people of Clare give Violet Anne Wynne 8,987 first-preference votes and a seat in Dáil Éireann?

For another instance: the heartbroken Kate O’Connell was a guest on Brendan O’Connor’s radio show after losing her seat in the election in February. O’Connell spoke of the reception she got on the doors during the campaign. It was terrible, she said. Nobody was interested in what Fine Gael had to say; as far as the honest burghers of Dublin Bay South were concerned, things could not get worse.

Now. If Dublin Bay South isn’t the most affluent constituency in Ireland it’s certainly worthy of a podium finish. And yet its electorate seem to think they’re in Stalingrad in 1943, eating their boots and waiting on the German bombs. Why? How could so affluent, so advantaged, so privileged an electorate think that? How are they so distanced from reality? And don’t tell me about Ringsend being in the constituency – Kate O’Connell no more visited Ringsend during the campaign than she visited Mars, the red planet.

For a third instance: one gets elected in Ireland by going on the stump. The personal touch. People like to see "himself". Funeral attendances win votes. How, then, could Patricia Ryan win 10,155 votes in Kildare South having gone on her holidays during the actual campaign? Feeding five thousand with two loaves and five fishes is run of the mill compared to this achievement. How did it happen?

If we are to have a native media, reporting and chronicling news and events relevant to Ireland, seen from an Irish perspective, these are the issues that should – that must – be reported on. That they’re not being reported on suggests an extraordinary systems-failure in the media itself, one that one billion tweets urging the little people to #buyapaper is unlikely to turn around.

Irish Politics Summed Up in Seventy-Seven Words

"The hospital was proposed in 2002/2003. One of my daughters was going into secondary school at the time. At the same time, there was a hospital proposed in Perth. That daughter of mine went through secondary school, went through medical school, went through internship and, two years ago, went out to Perth to work in the hospital. By the time she was working in the hospital, not a block had yet been laid for the Irish hospital."

Gerald Flynn, speaking about the projected cost overrun for the National Children's Hospital on RTÉ Radio One's Late Debate last Thursday, February 23, 2017.

Mickey Harte's Ongoing Boycott of RTÉ

Tyrone manager Mickey Harte hasn’t given an interview to RTÉ in five years, and counting. He has no problem with any Tyrone player doing interviews with RTÉ, but they don’t do them either, out of solidarity. Harte and the players do interviews with other media organisations, but not RTÉ.

How has this come to pass, and how can it have dragged on for so long?

It all started when Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh retired as RTÉ’s lead Gaelic Games broadcaster in the autumn of 2010. Some people thought that Brian Carthy would succeed Ó Muircheartaigh but instead RTÉ chose a rotating selection of commentators, including using commentators who were previously TV-only, such as Marty Morrissey and Ger Canning.

The feeling arose, rightly or wrongly, that RTÉ Sports were operating an anyone-but-Carthy policy. On May 23rd, 2011, Noel Curran, then Director-General of RTÉ, received a confidential letter protesting Carthy’s treatment. The letter was allegedly signed by Mickey Harte, Kieran McGeeney, Brian Cody, Mickey Moran, Justin McNulty, Conor Counihan and Kevin Walsh.

The details of the letter were leaked to the media, and portrayed as an attempt to dictate to RTÉ whom it should or shouldn’t employ. This is exactly what the letter was, of course, but this sort of lobbying occurs all the time. It may be a coincidence that Anthony Tohill disappeared from the Sunday Game after his criticism of Kerry’s Paul Galvin. Or it may not. Who knows?

Lobbying goes on all the time, with mixed success. Most broadcasters pay it no need. It's entirely their decision whom they employ or don't employ - how else, after all, would Tommy "Tom" Carr currently be commentating? It's not because the nation demands it, or will stop watching if Tommy isn't there to enlighten the viewing public.

Back to 2011. John Murray used to present a light-entertainment show on RTÉ Radio 1 in 2011 after Morning Ireland, in the slot currently occupied by Ryan Tubridy. The John Murray Show was light entertainment – a lot like a 2FM show, but less shouty, less music and with more material about going for walks and dealing with lumbago.

A fortnight after the letter protesting Carthy’s treatment arrived on Noel Curran’s desk, John Murray opened his show with a mock interview with Mickey Harte. The setup was that Murray asked questions that would be answered by recordings of Mickey Harte speaking in another context.

The idea was to satirise the idea of Mickey Harte deciding what RTÉ did or didn’t do. So Murray asks Mickey if it’d be OK for him (Murray) to present a show that morning from 9 to 10. When Mickey is OK with what, Murray went on to apologise for the Dalai Lama not being a guest (Harte had recently met the Dalai Lama) and, when Harte seemed to ask for a request, Murray played ten seconds of Daniel O’Donnell singing “The Pretty Little Girl from Omagh.”

This was an unfortunate choice of tune. Mickey Harte had a daughter who was a pretty little girl from Ballygawley, sixteen miles from Omagh. Michaela Harte was murdered at the age of 27 while on her honeymoon in January of 2011. It would be a lot to expect of Mickey Harte to see the funny side of that choice of song six months after burying his daughter.

And this is the reason for the dispute. RTÉ issued an apology for the sketch, saying that they regretted any offence caused, that this regret was “immediately and personally” communicated to Mickey Harte, and that RTÉ did not leak the letter.

The question of who did or didn't leak the letter is probably best solved by asking qui bono - who benefits from its leak? But it's odd the statement mentions the letter, because the letter doesn't matter in the light of the appalling tastelessness of the sketch. I don’t know if John Murray ever apologised on air, to the nation, about the sketch but I certainly don’t remember it or could find trace of it online.

What, then, to do? The Tyrone County Board, by all accounts, are deeply unhappy about the RTÉ boycott and are moving might and main to get Harte to relent. In the light of Harte’s actions concerning his home club in the ’eighties, it will take more than might or main to move him. Harte is a stubborn man, and it takes an awful lot to turn him.

So the question then arises of whether or not RTÉ have done enough to show their horror at so ghastly a sketch. Interviewed in the Irish News, Sunday Game host Michael Lyster is quoted as saying that “It’s not for the lack of effort or not for the lack of want” that the dispute is now in its fifth year.

We all inform our consciences in different ways. Some people would sit in the car outside Mickey Harte’s house day and night waiting to be forgiven. If crawling would help Harte carry his cross, why not crawl? It costs you nothing, and you may do some good. However unfair you feel Harte is being in his reaction, Michaela’s death was still worse by no small order.

Maybe RTÉ have done that. Maybe John Murray or Noel Curran or Ryle Nugent, RTÉ’s head of sport, sat in the car outside Mickey Harte’s house waiting for a chance to make good for days before giving up. Maybe they did.

The John Murray show ended on RTÉ Radio One in June, 2015. Murray himself was back on air in August of 2015 as one of the co-anchors of Weekend Sport. It is not known if the employment of Murray as a sports anchor is part of the effort or part of the want that Michael Lyster referred to in describing the national broadcaster’s attempts to bridge the gap between themselves and Mickey Harte.

Sky Sports and the GAA

Professor Paul Rouse delivered another scathing polemic against the GAA’s current deal to broadcast games on Sky Sports in the Examiner a week or two ago. One of the points that Rouse makes in his piece is that the Association has failed to explain why the GAA did a deal with Sky having maintained for years that it would not. But it is that much of a mystery, really?

The GAA made a deal with Sky Sports for the same reason that 99% of things happen in the world: money. The GAA wanted the money, Sky were willing to stump up. That’s why it happened.

Some of the objections to the Sky deal are centered on the idea that, by dealing with Sky, the great Irish nation is denied its birthright, the watching of Gaelic Games on television for free. But that birthright isn’t quite as clear-cut as may seem.

There was a time when only All-Ireland semi-finals and finals were shown live on TV. You got an hour’s highlights of that day’s games on the Sunday game for the rest of the Championship and that was your lot. As for the League, forget about it. So the notion of the watching of live Gaelic games on TV being part of what we are is a recent development in the long history of the Gael.

There is also the fact that games on terrestrial TV are not free. They are paid for by triptych of license fee, advertising and taxation. That’s not free. And that’s another significant question that the GAA has to wrestle with.

If the GAA cedes the point that watching Gaelic Games live on television is a birthright of the Gael,that limits the parties with whom the Association can do business in terms of selling the rights to those games. A discussion of business environment in which the Association has to deal was noticeably absent from Professor Rouse’s discussion in the Examiner.

As is, there are three terrestrial entities with whom the Association can deal. There is TG4, the best cultural fit, and the channel that were more than happy to broadcast league games, club games and ladies’ games when neither RTÉ nor TV3 would touch them without climbing into the hazmat suit first. Unfortunately, TG4 has no money relative to the other two and are therefore out of the reckoning. A pity, but a lot of things are a pity in this misfortunate world.

The demise of TV3’s coverage is the elephant in the room in all discussions of the GAA’s deal with Sky. TV3 were the first holders of Sky’s current games package, but that deal was not renewed. Why?

TV3 was (relatively) innovative in its coverage. Matt Cooper wasn’t the most thrilling of hosts but Peter Canavan and Darragh Ó Sé were able to give insights into modern football that are beyond some of RTÉ’s current analysts. Insights that were so good that Sky signed that duo up straight away.

So why didn’t the GAA renew their deal with TV3? Nobody’s ever said, but it’s reasonable to guess that they weren’t offered enough money. And that then presented the GAA with a problem.

If TV3 weren’t going to stump up then the GAA had no option but to take what RTÉ were willing to give them. And that severely limits the GAA’s options, not just in terms of money but also in terms of how they want the games to be presented.

There is a strange inclination in the Irish to settle for a fair amount of old rope from the national broadcaster. While the hurling panel can be good, RTÉ prefers to run a Punch-and-Judy show during football matches instead of the sort of half-time analysis that the people want, if not need. But if RTÉ has no competitor, there’s no way that’s going to change.

RTÉ’s coverage of Gaelic Games is lazy in the extreme. Its highlights show during the League is an edited version of the game that was live on TG4 earlier. Its innovative Sunday radio show, presented by Eoin McDevitt and Ciarán Murphy, got the chop after one summer to be replaced by some zombie horror featuring Marty Morrissey and Brenda Donaghue.

Newstalk came up with the biggest innovation in GAA broadcasting when they started doing live games with having two colour commentators, rather than one. It’s been a revelation to hear the likes of James Horan and Darragh Ó Sé discussing a game, an experience that takes adults back to their childhoods listening to adults in the car breaking down a game afterwards. RTÉ persist with Brian Carthy and Tommy “Tom” Carr. What can you say?

If the GAA do not deal with Sky than RTÉ know they have the Association over a barrel. The GAA can’t let that happen. This is a new multi-media age, and the GAA has to keep up and keep thinking outside the box. To never look past RTÉ is to become as stagnant as RTÉ themselves. With so many other obstacles existing in providing the sort of coverage the games deserve, ignoring Sky on a mistaken point of principle would be an extremely short-sighted and naïve decision.

Bias and the National Broadcaster

At first glance, the front page story in Saturday’s Irish Independent was a delicious revelation that, for all their bien-pensant rhetoric, the Irish Labour Party are just as venal as the next party when it comes to the dirty of game of politics.

The Indo reported that there had been a spat between Fine Gael and Labour over who would represent the Government advocating a Yes vote on the Prime Time debate tomorrow night. RTÉ wanted Leo Varadkar, the first Minister in the history of the state to come out as a gay man, but there was an agreement already in place between Fine Gael and Labour that it would be two Fine Gael, one Labour over the course of three RTÉ debates. Fine Gael had already used up their quota with Frances Fitzgerald and Simon Coveney, so Alex White was going on Prime Time and that was bloody that.

Great story. Not front page news, of course, but front page news hasn’t been what it was in the Indo since Vinnie Doyle retired. And then suddenly you might stop and wonder: what is it to RTÉ who represents any particular side anyway?

The story quotes an RTÉ source as saying "Our job was to get the best people for both sides, and one would have thought that Leo was the best person on the Government side for the last debate.”

But is it really RTÉ’s job to get the best people for both sides?

A referendum debate isn’t like a run-of-the-mill news or current affairs program. The national broadcaster’s job during a referendum or election campaign is to provide a public forum for debate. It is not the national broadcaster’s job to vet the debaters as regards their suitability to speak or represent a point of view. The national broadcaster’s only job is to measure speaking times for fairness and ask as unbalanced a set of questions as can be reasonably expected.

There is no national broadcaster in the USA, but the prospect of a commercial broadcaster stepping in to advise a political party on whom it should or shouldn’t use in a particular TV debate is ludicrous.

If, during the 2008 US Presidential Election, the Republicans wanted Sarah Palin to debate against former President Bill Clinton, can you imagine someone at one of the networks saying “our job was to get the best people for both sides, and one would have thought former Governor of California Arnold Schwartzenegger the best candidate to represent the Republican side?”

It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it? That’s not really the way it works.

To bring the story back home, suppose the No side decided on a second-time lucky strategy and put Gaelic footballer Ger Brennan forward as their representative for the Prime Time debate.

Would RTÉ turn to the No side and say, “look, Ger was a very underestimated center-half back in his prime but for a debate like this, you really need to send a heavy hitter like Breda O’Brien, David Quinn or Rónán Mullen to the plate”? Or would RTÉ just say “You’re sending Ger Brennan? Well, alrighty then,” and then text their friends to stock up on popcorn?

It’s not like RTÉ’s record in these debates is particularly strong. That the RTÉ Frontline debate cost Seán Gallagher the Presidency is as sure as little green apples. The only question is if that was due to incompetency or something more sinister.

In a sighting of that rare bird, investigative journalism, Jody Corcoran joined some dots about who’s pals with whom among the players on the night of that Frontline debate three years ago, and drew up a very interesting pattern. That piece was published three years ago, in March of 2012. Nothing changed as result of his investigation, of course. Nothing ever does.

There is No Free Press Without Regulation

Greybeards and seanfhondóirí who remember the ‘nineties can’t help but to have been a little bemused by the alliance formed by Eamon Dunphy and Pat Kelly on Pat Kenny’s radio show the other day. The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) has issued a code of conduct for broadcasters in Ireland. In response, Pat and Eamon teamed up to pretty much pour scorn on the whole idea before Michael O’Keeffe, chairman of the BAI, who didn’t really land a glove in his own proposals’ defence over twenty minutes.

What made the mouths of those greybeards grin beneath their grizzled whiskers was the memory of an article Eamon Dunphy wrote about Pat Kenny on the back page of the Sunday Independent in the early-to-mid ‘nineties, when Dunphy was the Designated Boot Boy of that particular organ. Unfortunately, the article can’t be quoted here as research shows this blog is sometimes read by children but take An Spailpín’s word for it – by the time Dunphy was finished kicking the stuffing out of Plank (sic) Kenny, there wasn’t enough of poor Pat left to put in a teaspoon and send back to his people.

Dunphy’s profile of Pat Kenny was utterly vicious. A stomping the like of which you rarely see. Appropriate to Pol Pot, maybe, or Stalin or Hitler. But not to TV show host who wore a jumper on his chat show.

And now here they were, kicked and kicker as bosom buddies, defending the right of the broadcasters to make their own decisions without interference from the dastardly BAI. Proof that principles come and go, but show business goes on forever.

It was a pity that Michael O’Keeffe wasn’t a bit more ready for them. He came across like a substitute teacher from whom naughty children have detected the smell of fear, and are determined to reduce to tears in the time allotted to them.

O’Keeffe should have pointed out that neither Kenny nor Dunphy are against regulation, per se. It’s just that they themselves are the ones who wanted to do the regulating, rather than someone else. Scholars will remember the ancient world had the same attitude to slavery; people had no objection in principle, as long as it was not they themselves who were the actual slaves.

Kenny and Dunphy found the proposed BAI regulations too constrictive. The found the forbidding of TV or radio show host to express his or her own opinion terrible, one of them remarking that such a regulation would put George Hook out of a job.

Like this would somehow be a bad thing.

And O’Keeffe took all this on the chin. What he could have said, of course, is that there are two words that prove that the broadcasters do indeed need a regulatory authority over them – The Frontline, and see what Pat Kenny made of them apples.

Not much, probably, but the facts are clear. Sean Gallagher had one foot in the Áras at half-nine on that Monday night, by midnight his head was cut clean off. No head has rolled. Not one.

The Chairman of the RTÉ Board is married to the most powerful spindoctor in the country. They say it doesn’t matter, because they never talk about work at home.

[And may An Spailpín take a moment to repeat again that the house does not belong to me. It belongs to my wife. A complete different person. Sure I barely know the woman, I don’t know why you people in the Revenue keep busting my nuts over it].

And so on, and on, and on. Of course it’s necessary for journalists to hold politicians to account, but journalists are also part of that same dance in the public square. Journalists have to be held to account too.

The BAI proposals aren’t perfect. They may not even be good. But that they are necessary in as clubby a society as Ireland’s is beyond all shadow of a doubt.

They Are Spartacus - Where to Now for Off the Ball?

The Off the Ball team seem to have had an “I am Spartacus” moment. Resignations are rare in Ireland, not least when it’s so very hard to get another job. Principles don’t pay the rent or put food on the table.

For a mass resignation like that of Eoin McDevitt, Ciarán Murphy, Ken Early, Simon Hick and Mark Horgan (MMEHH from here on in) to happen is either an inspirational show of solidarity, or else a mad moment of hubris that the people involved may live to bitterly regret.

The fans of Off the Ball, and they are legion, will hope it’s the former. Off the Ball was like no other sports show on radio. That said, the path ahead is difficult for MMEHH  - Ger Gilroy kept the show on the road last night and paid the missing members a lovely tribute. And then Gilroy did what a good pro does, and got on with business as usual. If they were listening, did a cool chill run through MMEHH’s bones as they realised just how easily business can go on as usual?

The big plus for MMEHH is that thing called chemistry. Nobody knows what creates it or destroys it. We only know it when it’s there.

Chemistry was present in spades on Off the Ball. The diverse mix of the MMEHH presenters complemented each other perfectly, for no reason other than the fact they just did. But once that spell is broken, neither all the king’s horses nor all the king’s men can ever put it back together again.

Just last week, the BBC arts show, The Review Show, was moved from BBC2 to BBC Four and will now broadcast monthly, instead of weekly. When it started twenty years ago The Review Show, then know as Late Review, was essential watching.  Panelist Tom Paulin represented the highbrows, Tony Parsons the low and Alison Pearson the reasonable middle. The debat was chaired by Mark Lawson, and it was perfect.

And then the team split up and it was never the same. The BBC moved different people in and out, but they could never bottle lightning again. Newstalk are currently emphasising the fact that Ger Gilroy is the man who invented the Off the Ball format in the first place, but everybody knows there’s a void there, and it’s a void that will be hard to fill.

For MMEHH, there is a question of where do they go from here. In Newstalk’s worst-case scenario, a deal has already been made with a competitor and there will now be a battle royal between the official and continuity Off the Balls. This will be about who gets the regular contributors – will they stay loyal to the brand or the boys?

Newstalk is not a station that makes money but it is powerful because of its ownership. If MMEHH thought that the contributors would prioritize personal over professional relationships, they could be in for something of a rude awakening.

There also the issue that media organisations tend to hire singly, rather than a group. If MMEHH hope to replicate the format intact on some other station, there is then the question of exactly which media organisation will sign up for that. Bear in mind it’ll be broadcasting against the Newstalk Off the Ball, which will sounds very, very familiar to MMEHH version. A Continuity Off the Ball will require listeners tracking them down by moving the dial, something that Irish radio listeners are surprisingly reluctant to do.

There is also the fact that there aren’t many stations that could broadcast the show. Newstalk, Today FM and Dublin 98 are all owned by the same entity. Will this resignation be held against MMEHH by Newstalk’s sister companies?

What about RTÉ? Tweeters are clamouring for Off the Ball’s appearance on the national broadcaster but, amidst all this speculation, your correspondent will lay you Carnaby Street against a China lemon that there is no way on God’s green Earth that RTÉ sport will throw open their arms to welcome the smart arses who’ve been laughing at them for years. Life’s not like that.

There is also the question of what happens when individual approaches are made. Does a man hold out with his comrades or does he think he’d really like to pay the mortgage this month?

In a time of clouded media ethics we can only admire a resignation that’s been made on principle. But we also only have to look at how effortlessly Savage Sunday replaced Sam Smyth’s show on Today FM to find out that Irish media is not a sentimental business.

We won’t know until we hear their side of the story, but MMEHH’s own personal situation is precarious in a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately industry. Off the Ball as we knew it could never have gone on forever but nobody could have expected its end to be so sudden. The best of luck to Eoin, Ciarán, Ken, Simon and Mark in their future careers. They made housework painless for a generation of men, and there are very few things that can achieve that miracle.

The Championship - Magnificent, in Spite of its Flaws

Francie Grehan surrounded by Tommy Joyce, Padraic Joyce, Alan Kerins and Ja Fallon. St Jarlath's Park, Tuam, 2001.

One of the quirks of the current football Championship structure is that, even though it takes twenty weeks to run the thing off, fully half the counties in Ireland are zapped over just two weekends.

Eight counties will rattle the dustbin on that weekend when June melts into July, and eight more bid glory a sweet adieu for another year fourteen days later. There are eleven games scheduled for that weekend of June 30^th/July 1^st – the eight Round 1 Qualifiers on Saturday, and then the second Ulster semi-final and both Leinster semis on Sunday. The Connacht Final is the grace note after the second Qualifier cull in the middle of July.

Having to keep tabs on eleven games in one weekend and nine in another is a Herculean ask of any football analyst. Thank goodness the RTÉ ones generally couldn’t bother their bottoms analysing anything. They and will merrily wing it, just like always. I believe Paddy McPlayer is playing very well for his club – isn’t that right Joe?

Of course, in between those rolling rocks of qualifier slaughter there is only one game. This year’s Munster Final sits in splendid isolation on Sunday July 8^th, even though Kerry and Cork are on the one side of the draw this year. Can most ardent of Déise, Treaty or Banner patriots, each more excellent than the last, expect anything other than one-way traffic in that one?

Nobody on any of the provincial councils has a phone number for anyone on any of the other councils, or for Croke Park. Every year they try to get the schedule right, and every year they can’t quite seem to manage it.

It was ever thus. The qualifiers are a joke, the scheduling is bockety, and the national broadcaster makes a very middling effort to give Gaelic football the serious analysis it deserves.

And despite all this, the glory of the Championship itself, for all its flaws, still shines incandescent through the summer. It captivates, infuriates enthralls and enraptures us, summer after summer, year after year.

This time last year the Championship looked like a two-horse race between Cork and Kerry. But the rebels got cold-cocked in the quarter-finals when Mayo forgot their place behind the door and Kevin McMenamon did what so few have been able to do in over one hundred years of All-Ireland finals – deliver Kerry a knock-out blow.

One year on, and Dublin have blazed a trail for the rest. Cork and Kerry remain favourites of course, but where Dublin lead other can follow. Dublin can even follow themselves – they enjoy home advantage all through the Championship, and have the boost that winning the title brings.

Mickey Harte is trying to do what only Seán Boylan has done before in the modern era, and build two different Championship winning teams. Kildare’s knocking on the door is getting louder and louder. Derry remain a mystery and Mayo – well, Mayo are a question for another day.

Sligo and New York fired the first shots of the Championship the week before last, and there are five games this weekend to keep things rolling. Of those five, Galway’s trip to Roscommon and Donegal’s trip to Cavan are the most appealing to people outside the counties involved.

The RTÉ panelists will hold their noses after the games. Somebody will dutifully patronise the players, while emphasising that none of this matter a whizz outside of June 10^th in Páirc Uí Chaoimh.

Which is exactly the attitude of people who can’t tell Jedward from Beethoven. To see the Championship as only being about the contenders is too see the great Pyramids at Giza and think they’re nice, alright, but wouldn’t they be even nicer with a nice bit of decking out the back?

The very existence of either the Championship or the Pyramids is a miracle in the 21^st Century, and something we should make the most of while either or both are still here.

Somebody will win the Championship this year, but that’s not the Championship is about. The Championship is about all these fantastic local rivalries, the myriad border words that are its heart, its soul and its splendor.

Besides, it’s a knockout Championship. Anyone can win the thing if their sails catch the wind and the ball hops right. Reader, think on the Hyde on Sunday and the great summers ahead, and drink deeply of the fine and tawny wine of its glory.

No Minister - There Must be an Enquiry into the Frontline

Atticus Finch, that wisest of men, tells Scout at one stage that sometimes, to understand a man, you have to walk around in his skin a little, to try to see the world as he sees it.

As the RTÉ-twitter row bubbles along – it is a mistake to call it Gallaghergate because Seán Gallagher is only a bit player in this; the totality of the story is greater – it is interesting to flush bias from the system by changing the names of the characters.

So let’s imagine that the Presidential Election had gone differently. Let’s presume that Gallagher had never taken off, and that the original front-runner had not been derailed. We then have a Frontline where David Norris is four days from the Park, and the rest are doing their best to nobble him.

Let’s say the story that broke in the summer, about David Norris’s non-mainsteam attitude to under-age sex has broken the weekend before the Fronline, and the waters have become choppy for the front-runner. Norris must face the music on the Frontline on Monday evening with the entire show on the line.

During the Frontline, Norris is under attack from Martin McGuinness, who is unhappy with Norris’s response to an interview with Helen Lucy Burke some years ago in Magill – about the time Seán Gallagher was passing around the hat for Fianna Fáil, as it happens. McGuinness sensationally alleges that Norris has written a letter of clemency on behalf of his former partner over allegations of statutory rape.

Norris is flustered, just as he was in the summer. Although a Senator, he is not match for McGuinness the cut and thrust of big time politics and is floundering badly.

And then a tweet appears from the McGuinness4Pres account, alleging the man at the centre of the Israeli trial will be at a press conference tomorrow. Reader, do you think The Frontline would have broadcast that tweet as they did the Gallagher one? Just like that?

All this hinges around whether or not the Frontline editorial team knew that the McGuinness4Pres account was not an official Sinn Féin account. It’s rather hard to believe that, so deep into the election campaign, they didn’t know what the official Sinn Féin account was.

Think about the David Norris scenario outlined above. The only difference is the order in which facts were revealed. Last Easter, David Norris was the nation’s darling. If the story had broken later than it did, maybe he would have held on to win the Park in the end.

But if the story had broken later, and his house was caving around his ears, would RTÉ have polished him off the way they polished off Gallagher if the circumstances were the same, as outline above? There is a defence of RTÉ story saying that it wasn’t the story but Gallagher’s reaction to the story that did for him. Norris’s reaction would have been no better.

It’s important to distance Gallagher from this. It’s not about Gallagher. Gallagher is an opportunist who almost pulled off the biggest coup of his entrepreneurial career, by offering the people what they wanted even though he was running for a job that couldn’t possibly deliver on that want.

What this scandal is about is how elections are run, and whether or not Ireland is a democracy or an oligarchy, where the state broadcaster plays its vital role in ensuring that only the right kind of people are elected.

The editorial team of the Frontline decided the last election. That is a power that they are not entitled to hold, and that is why there should be an inquiry into what happened, in order to ensure that it does not happen again. Why Minister Rabbitte can’t see that is a mystery, but then the Pat Rabbitte that is driven around in his ministerial Merc is quite a different bunny from the fire and brimstone prophet of the opposition benches. God help Ireland.

Magdagate: Another Mortal Wound for Irish Journalism

You can’t have a democracy without a free press. The biggest danger to Irish sovereignty isn’t the bailout; it’s the absence of a free and functioning press.

Why do you need a free press? You need a free press to hold the powerful to account. To tell people what their leaders are doing and saying on their behalf, to interpret it, to encourage discussion and to ensure that, when the people go to the polls, they are as informed as they can possibly be.

The Irish media are failing badly in this regard. Because the country is so small, it’s always been difficult to have a fully impartial media. Unfortunately, the past year has seen such a calamitous fall in standards that it is now at a stage where the main check to governance of the country is hors de combat, and that is a crisis in any democracy.

RTÉ let itself down on the double. Firstly, the extraordinary libel of Father Kevin Reynolds on Prime Time, and secondly, the scuppering of the Seán Gallagher Presidential campaign by a tweet that was sent from a clearly bogus account. Either is a scandal. The combination of both is mind-boggling as regards standards in a publicly funded national broadcaster.

Today FM disgraced itself in its treatment of Sam Smyth. God only knows what goes on editorially in Newstalk, other than to remark if Prime Time wanted to do a States of Fear II, Marconi House would be a good place to set it. Allegedly.

The Irish Times let itself down very badly indeed in its attempt to re-write history in the sad case of the death of Kate Fitzgerald. They probably know it and the libel laws don’t help, but it doesn’t make it right. It doesn’t make it right at all.

But even in the light of all this, there is something about the “Magda” story in yesterday’s Irish Independent that is particularly worrying. These are the facts: the Indo found an interview in a Polish magazine with a Polish woman who spoke about life in Ireland. The Indo printed the story as the woman having a big laugh at the dumb Paddies who are paying her way.

It would be the perfect newspaper story, if it weren’t for one pesky detail. It’s sensational, it’s got water-cooler appeal, and it rings a bell for people. There’s a whole generation of people who came home from J1s laughing at the Yanks and telling stories of the scams they pulled so it was only reasonable to assume that the new Irish were telling the same stories. And now here was proof.

The one pesky detail is that the story in the Indo bears no relation to the original Polish story. This is the Indo story; this is the Polish original, translated into English by the John Murray show on RTÉ Radio One. There is no basis for the Indo story in the Polish original. None at all. It’s all rubbish. Every word.

So how did it get printed? One of two ways. Either the Independent’s editorial process is so incredibly bad that they really don’t care whether or what they print has any basis in reality at all. The second possibility is worse. The second possibility is that they knew full well what was in the Polish original, and didn’t care.

If the article isn’t true, so what? Nobody’s named, therefore nobody’s libeled, therefore nobody can sue. It’s win-win. Sure they’ll be some yap about it but it’ll sell papers and the Indo will get a reputation as the paper that prints what others are too scared or – hah! – too “politically correct” to share with the nation.

The media is failing to self-regulate. No-one in the media will take on a powerful media group because who knows when the day will come when that somebody may need a new job and hope for food from a hand that they’ve bitten.

So journalists end up in the position of men in the women and children’s lifeboats – they feel terrible about the destruction of their profession, but they prefer it to drowning, thanks all the same.

That’s not good enough. Irish sovereignty is in greater danger from the absence of a free press than from the Troika, who only want their money back. Don’t let media cynicism take your freedom away. Don’t let it!

Claire Byrne is the Late Late Show's Only Hope

RTÉ has a dilemma in regard to the Late Late Show. It is this: the number of people who watch the show seems to exist in inverse proportion to those who actually like it.

If people stopped watching the Late Late, the next step for RTÉ would be obvious and inevitable. But people don’t stop watching. Twelve years since Gay Byrne did his last Late Late Show, the program remains a ratings juggernaut for RTÉ, even though the amount of people who claim to like it is equivalent to the current population of the Great Blasket.

The Late Late is an anachronism. In its glory years of the 1970s and 1980s, there was nothing else. The very presence of people in Ireland talking on television about Irish things was remarkable in and of itself. To think that that the Gay Byrne Late Late was shy about combing the RTÉ canteen is to re-write history. But that wasn’t a problem then, because the very existence of the show was novel and thrilling. Who cared if this was Maureen Potter’s ten millionth appearance? Ireland had taken her place among the nations of the Earth.

That thrill is now long gone. The audience’s sophistication has increased dramatically, meaning that they are less tolerant of the revolving guest list of Pat Shortt, Brendan O’Carroll and someone from Fair City. But they are not so sophisticated as to go watch something else. The nation hasn’t reached that level yet, it seems.

This presents RTÉ with a dilemma. The show must stay on the road because it brings in the money necessary to pay those extraordinary RTÉ salaries, but the standard of show is now so low that it has to be depressing everyone who works in Montrose. It’s time for a change. Tubridy is out of his depth. They need a new host – or hostess.

Miriam O’Callaghan is presented as the Woman Most Likely whenever this discussion comes up, but RTÉ should be a little more daring and give the Late Late Show a 21st Century hostess. Someone who can talk equally well to the Fair City starlets before the break and put the heat on public figures after.

There’s only one choice. It has to be Claire Byrne, and for three reasons.

Firstly, she can do all the frothy stuff, as she does weekly on the Daily Show. Your correspondent has never seen the Daily Show but it’s almost certainly fine, if that’s your bag. Tubridy is fine interviewing the Fair City barmaids too, but it was, famously, a point of contention for Pat Kenny.

But while Tubridy struggles with the grown-up stuff, Byrne is excellent, as she proves daily on the Late Debate on Radio One and used to prove on the Newstalk Breakfast Show. This is the second point in her favour. Claire Byrne understands current affairs. Not only is she is a tenacious interviewer, but she never editorialises. She knows he purpose is to moderate debate, rather than participate in it.

The final reason Claire Byrne would make an excellent hostess for the Late Late Show is less obvious, but vital. She can’t be pushed around.

It’s a small thing, but subtly revealing – the Newstalk Breakfast Show does a paper view every morning. And while your correspondent hasn’t been keeping score, I do have the impression that Ivan Yates always does the broadsheets and Chris Donaghue always does the tabloids. When Claire Byrne co-hosted, they alternated. That says a lot about La Byrne.

If the Late Late Show can be saved, it’s only Claire Byrne that can do it. And if RTÉ send Brendan O’Connor to Mongolia and replace his wretched show with Máirtín Tom Sheáinín’s marvellous Comhrá on TG4, that wouldn’t be a bad day’s work either.

The Freedom of the Press

The Father Kevin Reynolds libel case has opened Pandora’s Box for the Irish media. Things will never be the same again.

People who believe the Government’s request to the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland to investigate how Mission to Prey, the Prime Time Investigates program at the root of the problem, is a knee jerk response are completely mistaken.

The Government have no option but to initiate an inquiry, and it’s entirely possibly as a result of this that the Irish libel laws, which are restrictive in the first place, will become like an iron maiden for press freedom and for the public’s ability to correctly inform itself of what’s going on in the country and in the world.

This will be a disaster for the country, and if it comes to pass it will all be RTÉ’s fault.

Some weeks ago, the Phoenix magazine outlined the efforts made by Father Reynolds to clear his name before the program was broadcast. If even half the details outlined in that Phoenix story are true, this isn’t a case of an accidental libel, like printing a photo of a protest with a libelous placard that the picture desk didn’t spot in time. There were several stages at which RTÉ could have said: hold on, this doesn’t add up. Go back and make sure its true. They didn’t.

What RTÉ did, according the Phoenix, was the equivalent of climbing up on the roof of the house, standing on one leg, drinking a bottle of whiskey, dancing a jig and then being astonished when you fall off the roof and break your bloody neck.

Any step on its own was looking for trouble. To combine one after the other until disaster was categorically guaranteed suggests that RTÉ deserved all they got, and more.

The tragedy is that Ireland has never needed a free press more. One of the reasons that Irish politics is in such a wretched mess is because the journalism and reporting is so bad.

There is more than one reason for this, of course, and some of them are to do with the journalists themselves. Journalists are too easily swayed in Ireland because the country – and particularly the Bermuda triangle bound by Dáil Éireann, the Shelbourne Bar and Doheny and Nesbitt’s – is so very, very small. There is no self-regulation either because jobs are so few and so hard to come by. Nobody will bite a hand on which he or she may later rely for food.

But the other reason standards in Irish journalism are so low is because it’s so very difficult to raise legitimate issues of public interest without involuntarily libeling someone.

The press is permanently muzzled, and that stops them from doing their job, of holding the powerful accountable to the powerless. For instance; wouldn’t it be interesting to know just exactly how planning was granted for the different ghost estates in the country? Who voted yea, who voted nay, and why? But that question never gets asked, because councilors get their lawyers to write letters, and no provincial paper, in these times, could defend a hideously expensive libel case.

People don’t realise that they’re being kept in the dark because they do not trust the press to use their power wisely. You may think a particular politician a bum, a thief and a louse, but every five years you get a cut at him. You do not get a cut at the editor of a major national newspaper, or some wise guy who take a piece of you in print and make you a laughing stock in your community.

One of the editors of a major national newspaper – about to retire, if reports are to be believed – likes to complain loudly about the libel laws. His complaints would be easier to take if it were easier to believe that they arose out of a passion for freedom of speech, rather than freedom of his own speech. His frequent hectoring media performances suggest that he has a very particular view of who should be free to speak, and who should not.

And that won’t wash with people. The press, like Caesar’s wife, has to be above suspicion. People will not write a blank cheque for the Irish media until the Irish media proves itself responsible and worthy of the people’s trust.

The USA has the freest press in the world, and consequently the most responsible. For instance: The Chicago Sun-Times fired a TV critic for inaccurate reporting during the summer. Specifically, she wrote a review of a Glee concert that mentioned a song that was not performed at the concert. A Glee concert is about as trivial a thing as you can imagine, and they still canned her after seventeen years.

A famous writer and four editors of the Detroit Free Press were suspended without pay in 2005 because the writer wrote in a column that two former members of a College basketball team were at a game that they did not actually attend.

The players told the writer they were going but missed their flight or didn’t make it some other way, but really, it doesn’t matter to buggery whether the lads were there or not. The Detroit Free Press didn’t care. They issued the suspension on a matter of principle.

Hard to imagine anyone getting a hour on the naughty step for that sort of carry-on here – eh, readers?

RTÉ have pushed the cause of press freedom back to the Victorian Era, if not further, and the press are the people on whom we’re relying to investigate the Chinese walls between NAMA and the National Pension Reserve Fund, on whom we rely to tell us what our TDs do as we cannot possibly otherwise know, and on whom we rely to tell us what is going on Brussels and how will it shape our lives.

I hope RTÉ didn’t break that bottle of whiskey when they came off the roof that time. I think we could be glad of some anesthetic thinking about this.