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    In the Eye of the Times – a week as seen by the Irish Times

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      For those who see the media affected by liberal or secular bias, for those who see the media as agents of corrupt power, reading the editorial direction of any particular newspaper is a simple task. They can always find confirmation of their view in particular opinion pieces or news stories. Ireland’s newspapers do not define themselves as those of many European countries do, on liberal/conservative, left/right, secular/religious lines. Our newspapers, like our main political parties, have a bit of everything. Assessing a newspaper’s orientation thus requires more than a reading the (little-read) editorial opinion columns or contributor opinion pieces. These can give us clues, but little more. Newspapers make it their business to ensure a spread of columnists: Joe Higgins TD and Senator Ronan Mullen write in the Irish Daily Mail; John Waters and Fintan O’Toole write in The Irish Times. Inclusions and exclusions in news selection, the tendency and tone of headlines, the choice of vocabulary – all of these details, and many more, contribute to the impact a newspaper has on its readers. With these characteristics in mind I took a snapshot of The Irish Times in an arbitrarily chosen week, Monday 23rd to Saturday 28th April. Several major themes ran through the news coverage and opinion pieces for some or all of those six days: the referendum on the fiscal treaty, the troika view of and the prospects for the Irish economy, media ownership and diversity issues and internal disputes at Independent News and Media, the French presidential election and its possible impact on EU policies. All of these were also extensively covered by other media. The Irish Times also had its selected themes, carrying several stories prominently on education, and on the Catholic Church, and on the connections between them. It ran features under the rubric, The Politics of Water, and a series of pieces in the foreign news pages about the Caucasus region, ahead of a meeting in Dublin of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). No other Irish medium showed anything like the same interest in the OSCE meeting. The Irish Times’ piece in this series on Azerbaijan excluded any reference to the capital, Baku, as the location of the Eurovision Song Contest, so it did not try to connect the subject to a broad readership. The choice of topic and its treatment reflected the agenda of the inter-governmental organisation, OSCE, and of its host this week, the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs. The newspaper takes this perspective in many other matters, basing much of its agenda on the government’s and focusing its coverage on individual ministers. Front-page headlines of this week name-checked Varadkar (Monday), Gilmore (Tuesday), Howlin (Wednesday), Kenny (Friday). Gilmore was centre-stage on a report about trade unions advocating a No vote in the referendum. Howlin took the lead on a report about public service employees’ allowances being under scrutiny. Kenny was credited in a report that the state (deferentially State in The Irish Times house-style) might get a possible larger-than-expected proportion of the sale price of state assets. The first two of these stories, at least, could have been told from other perspectives, e.g. Pressure builds on ICTU to advocate No, or Public service unions vow to protect allowances. The Irish Times’s choices indicate a primary orientation to those in political, economic, cultural, educational and other elites: other front-page names during the week included O’Reilly (Thursday) of Independent News and Media, Le Brocquy (Thursday), whose death was very generously marked, and Bono (Friday), in reference to his role in a spat between property developers. Two members of the European political elite, Sarkozy and Hollande, were named in a page-1 headline on the French presidential election (Monday) as presumably familiar to readers. Personal names and personal agency were less clearly stated when it came to questionable behaviour by people in authority. A page-1 report (Monday) on ministers’ spending €7 million on outside consultancies merely listed the larger spends, without giving any standard by which to judge whether this was a lot or a little. A story on Michael Lowry (Tuesday) was another product of the assiduous work of public affairs correspondent Colm Keena: the reports on page 1 and page 5 recorded that property owned by a Lowry company was not recorded on the TD’s register of interests, and listed documented details about the company and about Lowry’s connections with disgraced financier Michael Fingleton. The Irish Times did not state, “Lowry fails to register land ownership”, much less explore his previous record in this regard or the sanctions for not making complete returns. As it turned out, there was no failure of compliance on Lowry’s part: The Irish Times (Saturday) reported that an Oireachtas committee had ruled that Lowry was not required to register details of the property transaction, just his directorship of the company involved. If this was a correction of the earlier report, it was not presented as such. The Irish Times, if we are to judge by the minuscule Corrections column, very rarely gets things wrong, and then only on relatively trivial details. A muffled 38-word first sentence led a page-1 report (Wednesday) on a Catholic priest against whom sex abuse allegations were made being allowed to continue in service. Here too, the passive voice much favoured by The Irish Times was used: “the parish pastoral council was not given any of this information”, “Father Benito was allowed to serve”, etc. The paper did not identify who was responsible for these decisions. Coverage of the Catholic Church also included extensive coverage of the forthcoming Eucharistic Congress (Tuesday), including a striking front-page photograph of a woman with the veil she wore to the 1932 Congress, and a long feature (Tuesday) about church influence in teacher education that included some critical from students. However, The Irish Times did not give as much attention as other media during the week to church-government differences over mandatory reporting of sexual abuse claims, nor to the church’s censure of broadcaster-priest

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    Denis O’Brien: a complicated career and dubious ethics

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    Denis O’Brien is one of Ireland’s leading entrepreneurs with investments in international telecoms, radio, media, property, aircraft leasing, golf and other leisure interests. He founded the Esat Telecom Group plc and built it throughout the 1990s until its sale to British Telecom plc for €2.4 billion. He became a Portuguese resident and avoided £55m in taxes otherwise due. He also founded Communicorp Group which he owns outright to manage a portfolio of media and broadcasting-related companies in Ireland and eight other European countries. These include 98FM, Newstalk, Today FM, Highland Radio, Spin 1038 and Spin South West. He has a €600m stake (around 22%) in INM which owns the Evening Herald, Irish Independent, Sunday Independent, Sunday World and the Irish Daily Star, as well as 14 regional titles, two free newspapers, and a magazine. He founded Digicel in 2001 when the company launched a GSM cellular phone service in the Caribbean. Digicel has extended its operations to 32 markets with over 11 million subscribers in the Caribbean, Central America and Pacific regions. In the year to March 2011, revenues at Digicel were up 27% to $2.23bn. In 2010 O’Brien netted $693 million from the sale of his Digicel Pacific Limited (DPL) business to the Digicel group. In 2005, O’Brien became Deputy Governor of the revered Bank of Ireland. Simultaneously, he moved his residence from Portugal to Malta, for tax avoidance reasons. He resigned from the position of Deputy Governor Bank of Ireland, and also as a member of the Bank’s ‘court’, in 2006. O’Brien also resigned from the Norkom Group and from the UCD Smurfit School of Business. O’Brien is a member of the Bilderberg group. O’Brien part-funded the wages of Irish soccer manager, Giovanni Trapattoni. He is Chairman of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Judging Panel, having previously been a recipient of the award. In 2010, he was named Goodwill Ambassador for the city of Port-au-Prince in recognition of his efforts to rebuild Haiti and attract foreign direct investment. The Guardian recently ran a piece headlined “How an Irish telecoms tycoon became earthquake-devastated Haiti’s only hope of salvation”, which detailed how Port au Prince’s iconic Iron Market will shortly reopen “all down to Denis O’Brien”. He is the Chairman and Co-Founder of Frontline, the International Foundation for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders which “works to ensure that the standards set out in the UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, adopted in 1998, are known, respected and adhered to worldwide”. In 2000, Denis O’Brien established The Iris O’Brien Foundation, named after his mother, to identify and assist projects in Ireland and internationally which aim to alleviate disadvantaged communities. The foundation has broad aims, including promoting human rights, helping people affected by disasters, helping people with a mental or physical handicap, advancing education and supporting the arts. The foundation has spent nearly €15.4m on charitable works. O’Brien has links with Unicef, the Special Olympics, and Camara, which sends computers to developing countries. He has also funded multicultural awards and awards run by Social Entrepreneurs Ireland. He serves on the US Board of Concern Worldwide. He once donated £250,000 he had been awarded in libel damages to Amnesty International for which he sometimes hosts (not always uncontroversial) lunches. He was Chairman of the 2003 Special Olympics World Summer Games when the games were held in Ireland. In 2011, he provided money for the Presidential campaign of Mary Davis who had been CEO of the Special Olympics at that time. He has an honorary doctorate from UCD and is a mate of former US President, Bill Clinton. Indeed, he flew him to the recent Dublin Castle beano in his jet, and later paid the tab for a late-nighter in the Unicorn restaurant with Clinton, the strangely ever-present Séamus Heaney and 22 others. If you mention your charitable cause to Denis O’ Brien he is likely to give you his personal phone number. In short he is a dynamic and successful businessman and a hero to charities. Presumably on the back of this, he was a high-profile guest at events for Queen Elizabeth II, with whom he was oft-photographed earlier this year and at the two Irish Global Economic Forum conferences, whose invitees were suggested by the Department of Foreign Affairs (though this did not stop some protestations from Éamon Gilmore’s Labour Party), held in the last year or so. Last March, a judicial tribunal found that a former minister for communications, Michael Lowry, “secured the winning” of the 1995 mobile phone licence competition for Denis O’Brien’s Esat Digifone. The tribunal also found that O’Brien made two payments to Lowry, in 1996 and 1999, totalling approximately £500,000, and supported a loan of Stg£420,000 given to Lowry in 1999. In his 2,348-page report, Mr Justice Michael Moriarty found that the payments from O’Brien were “demonstrably referable to the acts and conduct of Mr Lowry” during the licence process, acts which benefited Esat Digifone. In effect O’Brien was trading in influence or ‘legal corruption’. His former mate, Barry Maloney, absented himself from the recent Irish Global Economic Forum, writing to the Taoiseach and Tánaiste informing them that he could not attend the event because Mr O’Brien would be a participant, despite the criticisms of him made in the final report from the Moriarty Tribunal. Maloney had given evidence to the tribunal that in 1996 he had a discussion while jogging with O’Brien concerning payments that Maloney, as chief executive of Esat Digifone, was obliged to sanction. O’Brien remarked that he himself had to make two payments of £100,000, one of which was to then Fine Gael minister, now Independent TD, Michael Lowry. This, he said, was a joke. What was not a joke, however, was the termination of Sam Smyth’s contract with O’Brien-owned Today FM. Smyth was the best-informed commentator on the Moriarty Tribunal and drew legal proceedings from both Lowry and O’Brien for his troubles. The point, for these purposes, about Denis O’Brien is that, if you believe that not

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    Village editor on Irish Times’ misreporting of SIPO’s Cllr Oisin Quinn ethics case

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    Interesting to see how the Irish Times, the newspaper of record, handles challenging and sensitive stories concerning the political establishment – when you know what the real story is. Here’s an article from a December edition: Councillor’s property stake and vote to be investigated MARY MINIHAN, writing in the Irish Times THE STANDARDS in Public Office Commission is to investigate alleged contraventions of the ethical framework for the local government service by Labour Dublin city councillor Oisín Quinn. The complaint against Mr Quinn relates to his participation in votes on the draft Dublin City Council’s development plan while he had an interest in a property in the city. The property, which Mr Quinn has declared in his annual declaration of interests, is 84-93 Lower Mount Street, the majority of which is occupied by the Revenue Commissioners. Mr Quinn continues to have a one-sixth interest in the property. A public sitting of the commission will be held next Monday to investigate the complaint submitted by Michael Smith, editor of Village magazine and formerly of An Taisce, and Independent councillor Cieran Perry. They wrote to the commission on November 23rd, 2010. According to the commission, the investigation will take place under the Ethics in Public Office Acts 1995 and 2001 (the Ethics Acts) and part 15 of the Local Government Act 2001. Mr Quinn said the same complaint had previously been made to the council’s ethics registrar and had been rejected. “I believe I behaved with exemplary care and transparency,” Mr Quinn, a nephew of Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn, said. “I believe I followed not just the letter but also the spirit of the ethical framework. I took advice by asking the city manager, senior city planners and the city law agent for their view and, importantly, I followed their advice and did it transparently by putting it on the record at the start of the meeting.” The complaint from Mr Smith and Mr Perry states Mr Quinn had an interest in the “substantial and valuable” property and acknowledges that he has disclosed this to the council in writing as required. The complainants argue that Mr Quinn should have refrained from voting on matters relating to the development plan. They argue that he breached the ethics provisions of the Local Government Act 2001 and the associated code of conduct for councillors on a number of grounds, one of which was “through his speaking persuasively to, and voting for, other resolutions in . . . July 2010 which would have allowed increases in heights across the inner city including for his own property on Lower Mount Street”. The complaint continues: “His disclosure before the 2010 meeting was not accompanied by his leaving the chamber and refraining from voting.” The council’s ethics registrar previously told Mr Smith and Mr Perry: “I am satisfied that there has been no breach of the ethics framework contained in the Local Government Act 2001 and the code of conduct for councillors.” Here are the problems, as I see it: 1) Mary Minihan uses comments from only one side of the story. I would have been unwilling to give her a quote, as there is a quasi-judicial hearing imminent and it is unedifying, and inappropriate and unfair (at least while Oisín Quinn remained silent) for us as complainants to comment. I wonder what guidelines the Irish Times has on this. 2) The article not only uses comments from only one side, it is also one-sided in outlining the respective cases. It is unbalanced and it makes multiple mistakes all of which, not uncoincidentally, are to our detriment, not Cllr Quinn’s. For example: A) Balance a) the article tendentiously quotes six of Oisín Quinn’s arguments and only three of ours, one of which is essentially a repeat though an inaccurate one and b) it suggestively finishes up with a quote from an apparently independent source supporting the first (key?) argument Oisín Quinn makes in the article. B) Inaccuracies in reporting central details of our case a) Mary Minihan does not state our best case, part of which is that Cllr Quinn improperly proposed changes in height in ‘Dublin 2 minus the Georgian area’ – a far smaller area than the ‘inner city’ and therefore far more blatantly to his financial advancement and b) she comprehensively mis-states our case – we did not argue that he ‘should not have voted on matters relating to the development plan’ merely on height standards that affected his property (I’m going to ask the Irish Times to correct this – we’ll see how I get on [see below]); C) Inaccuracies in reporting central thrust of our case Mary Minihan entirely fails to understand our case which is that if you make a declaration you (obviously!) withdraw: there are no brownie points under ethics legislation for declaring a relevant interest and then voting – it’s quite simple; D) Apparent unawareness of current status of complaint Finally, she emphasises not just once but twice the hasty, and obviously not independent, view of the ‘ethics registrar’ who works as a senior official in the local authority whose officials had advised Oisín Quinn to make a declaration and then stay to vote. She never mentions that SIPO, which looked at the ethics registrar’s opinion, considered our complaint for over a year, delegated an inspector to follow up the complaint and then took an official decision to pursue it. Cieran Perry and I will probably take no further role in this case. The essential case we made will now be presented on behalf of SIPO by its senior counsel, not by us. This matter is more relevant than the matter she mentions twice, regarding the current status of our complaint. You’d think from her article that our case could be borderline frivolous or vexatious. In short, Mary Minihan quotes comments from Cllr Quinn but not from us, quotes twice as many arguments for his case as for ours, does not state our best case, mis-states the rest of

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    All talk: Ireland’s political discussion sites

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    Miriam Cotton surveys the political web forums causing a stir Bondwatch Ireland / The Chattering Magpie 14 Editor: Diarmuid O’Flynn Describe your website/what made you decide to set it up? Thechatteringmagpie14 is a blog of short articles explaining/updating our protest in Ballyhea. BondwatchIreland is about the next 12 bonds due for payment, the ‘Dirty Dozen’ – with details of the individual bonds as they arise. Because of the total lack of coverage/exposure in the mainstream media (print, radio, TV), people don’t know that most of the bank bonds have yet to mature. Over €60bn has still to be paid over the coming three years and more. This blog and protest shines a light on those bonds, a place where people can learn the truth of what’s happening. Even as we’re informed on a weekly basis of more cuts in our already suffering public service, more proposed taxes and levies, our banks – with our money – are paying out on those failed bonds, week after week, month after month, with no attendant publicity. Those on-going payments are a scandal, the on-going lack of major media coverage is also a scandal. This site is an effort to inform those who want to be informed. What are your two favourite political/current affairs sites/blogs and why? NamaWinelake – the most up-to-date, the most concise, the most accessible information on what’s going on in the murky world of Irish finance; and David McWilliams (www.davidmcwilliams.ie) – populist, but his articles are an easy read, and for the most part make eminent good sense. Generally speaking, what value do you think sites like yours offer that mainstream media and news reporting do not? The view from the bottom, with no vested interest, no worries about appealing to the lowest common denominator. What type of reader/user does your site attract? No idea, but probably those who are already concerned about the official imbalance between looking after banks/financial institutions and looking after people. How many registered users do you have? I don’t get into that‚ whoever is there is there, I’m not concerned about numbers. How many visitors and page views would you have in a typical month? Again, no idea, and no idea who I could track this‚ wouldn’t be interested in doing so. Have you ever come under pressure to take down valid stories or posts? How did you deal with it, if so? No. Contact Information: Web: http://bondwatchireland.blogspot.com/ Email: Ballyhea@eircom.net Twitter: @ballyhea14 Comment: An essential blog publishing information about the most critical economic activity affecting the country. Putting the national news media to shame. Broadsheet.ie Editor: John Ryan Describe your website/what made you decide to set it up? It’s a rolling news site with jokes uploaded every 15 minutes Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm with sporadic posting through the night and at weekends. It was set up to provide a news source for the bewildered by the bewildered. What information/stories, if any, have first been published on your site, ahead of the mainstream media? There have been a few. Sometimes they even credited us! Which was lovely. What are your two favourite political/current affairs sites/blogs and why? Right at this moment I like NamaWinelake and TheStory.ie. Generally speaking, what value do you think sites like yours offer that mainstream media/news reporting do not? A cynical and jaded worldview. What type of reader/user does your site attract? The urban or rural stoner of all ages. How many registered users do you have? None. How many visitors and page views would you have in a typical month? Visitors: 615,000, page views: 1.5 million Have you ever come under pressure to take down valid stories or posts? How did you deal with it, if so? If it is completely spurious we try when possible to print the solicitors’ letters on the site in an effort to ridicule them and their prose style. Contact Information: Web: http://broadsheet.ie Email: Use contact form on website Twitter: @broadsheet_ie Comment: Ireland’s answer to The Onion? Witty, sharp and exquisitely presented. Priority is entertainment and delectation over heavy politics, which incidentally appear to be broadly libertarian. Could use an ‘About us’ and a ‘Mission Statement’. The Cedar Lounge Revolution Administrator: Dónal Mac an éala Describe your website/what made you decide to set it up? The Cedar Lounge is a left-wing blog with a core group of four regular contributors supplemented by a broader group of up to ten irregular contributors. It deals with politics, culture, political economy and other matters. The decision to establish it was that the original core group (which has changed a bit over the years) having been through the bear-pit that is Politics.ie wanted to establish a space which was neutral, in the sense of not being party-political, but which was overtly left of centre, using the term ‘left’ in its broadest definition (including social-democrat, further left, republican, socialist, feminist, anarchist and so on) in a courteous and welcoming environment for all those interested in politics, particularly those of the left, but embracing those from the centre and right also. We also wanted to be able to discuss issues in greater detail than in the forum context. And we were sick of trolls, negativity, etc, etc. It wasn’t that we were unwilling to hear voices who differed, but we wanted to hear serious voices who would respect difference rather than simply see it as an excuse for attacks. What information/stories, if any, have first been published on your site, ahead of the mainstream media? Only one, where we hinted at the nationalisation of Anglo-Irish which I’d heard about some hours previously through knowing people linked to those making the decision. But that’s it. We’ve never been interested in news-breaking or news-making but rather commentary on news. We’re not journalists so we don’t see our function as supplanting journalism but rather running parallel to (or slightly behind) it. What are your two favourite political/current affairs sites/blogs and why? Michael Taft’s (Economist for the Unite Trade Union) Notes on the Front (notesonthefront.typepad.com) – political

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    The web’s political rainbow (October 2011)

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    A vibrant network of websites is publishing information and debating issues that Ireland’s mainstream media should have but did not, writes Miriam Cotton The citadel of mainstream Irish journalism has been disturbed by the arrival of interactive, internet-based news and discussion forums that anyone can participate in. A vibrant network of websites has appeared and while they could be as much criticised as praised, many are a serious challenge to the status quo. And most of them are free. This phenomenon is not generally liked by the Irish media establishment which has had to make concessions to it by putting its own offerings online – albeit with strictly controlled opportunities for interaction with the hoi polloi, if there is any at all. There’s a lot of harrumphing about the need to protect professional journalism which in reality may be as much about a desire to keep control of the news agenda in certain hands as it is about any threat to the quality of journalism. Despite this, the mainstream media have been compelled to acknowledge facts and opinions they would much rather have ignored were it not for the healthy debates taking place on internet forums that frequently expose gaping holes in media coverage. Anyone who doubts this should visit the Ballyhea Bondwatch Ireland site, the NamaWinelake blog or The Story.ie to mention just a few of the sites which have stolen a march on mainstream journalism by researching and publishing information that the mainstream should have, but did not. A survey of some of the main political news and discussion websites follows below but first a few things to be aware of for the uninitiated web-surfer. Most of these sites allow comments or news stories to be published by anyone who thinks they have something to say. The quality of what is published can therefore vary a lot. Keep an open mind and remember that joining the discussion is very often like taking a walk down Main Street – every sort of person is there. Some of it, it must be acknowledged, is just plain dross – and some of it is brilliant and original. Sometimes people make the mistake of thinking the owners or moderators of a website are responsible for or endorse the content of posts and comments when they do not. On PoliticalWorld.org, Politics.ie or Indymedia Ireland, for example, the moderators have no idea what will be on the site until it is posted live by contributing authors, when it can immediately be read by hundreds of visitors. What could be more open or editorially interference-free? Anything defamatory or untrue will typically be deleted as soon as it is spotted – website owners have to be vigilant about this and the good ones have strict guidelines for contributing. The bad ones quickly lose credibility – and visitors. Another feature of the internet news world is that many, if not most, posters use unusual pseudonyms. This lends an anarchic feel to the experience, the virtual equivalent of a masked ball at which people identify themselves by all sorts of weird and wonderful names: ‘Twentymajor’, ‘ComfortablySmug’ and ‘SwearyMary’, for instance. Many people – especially politicians – dislike having comments directed at them by anonymous critics. A tough skin is needed if you are likely to find yourself the butt of general ire. Labour Party supporters are now entering the cold and hostile internet waters (The Straits of Minor Coalition Partners) where the Green Party’s ship recently went down with all hands. On the plus side, the criticism is mostly a reasonable calling-to-account of politicians and others, usually given a much easier ride by mainstream journalists who need to keep political sources on-side if they are to stay on the inside track of the politico-corporate establishment. So what does mainstream journalism make of all this? MIT Media Lab’s Nigel Negroponte has been widely and approvingly quoted by colleagues, criticising what he calls the spectacle of the ‘Daily Me’ – a pejorative directed at users of the internet who seek out the news sources that interest them the most, disobediently rejecting the pre-digested news menu of the mainstream. But what about the ‘Daily Them’ which until the advent of the internet had complete control over what the vast majority got to hear and read? In Ireland this was and still is particularly problematic among purveyors of traditional news media. The small, stifling world of Irish journalism is now so embedded with political and corporate PR power that the resulting slant on its reportage is as unnoticed and uncommented on as breathing to all bar a few of them, regardless of how objective they almost all so earnestly believe they are. As to the quality of internet websites, mainstream journalists need to look to the mote in their own collective eye. Isn’t an awful lot of journalism luridly tabloid and notoriously riddled with mistakes and misinformation? Where broadsheet journalism is concerned, doesn’t the dull agreement that crosses all political boundaries operate in effect – aside altogether from its own inaccuracies and omissions – as a form of censorship against other perspectives? Is it possible to distinguish the observations of Fionnan Sheahan, Matt Cooper, Laura Noonan, Dan O’ Brien, Brendan Keenan, Sean Collins, Sarah McInerney, Ivan Yates, Áine Kerr and screeds of others of our most respected mainstream commentators? They are almost all, essentially, of one view-point. This anodyne consensus is not unique to Irish journalism. As the world-renowned journalist, John Pilger once reported: “During the Cold War a group of Russian journalists toured the United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by their hosts for their impressions. ‘I have to tell you’, said their spokesman, ‘that we were astonished to find after reading all the newspapers and watching TV, that all the opinions on all the vital issues were by and large, the same. To get that result in our country, we imprison people, we tear out their fingernails. Here, you don’t have that. What’s

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