4 May-June May-June PB
T
here was a time when we believed Village
was publishing good stories and more ‘con-
servative’ media were ignoring them
because it was Village. Enduring the sni-
ness of posher rivals was a workaday hazard
for the tiny team with no actual employees, operating
from, no that’s too active a term, sometimes found in,
an oce that hadn’t been dusted since before Covid,
equipped with Vincent Browne’s old computers and
Word 1998, with nowhere to sit down and a landline
that’d been o the hook for eleven years because the
editor claimed to be too busy to put it back.
We revelled in the injustice of it all and it only
increased our zeal on behalf of other victims of injus-
tice. Then, after fifteen years of a sort of nothingness,
we ran a piece about Taoiseach Leo Varadkar leaking
a document to a friend, the hounds of political hell
broke loose and even a Village story now got picked
up. All very well, but for the few who had been listen
-
ing it showed up the poverty of earlier eorts, and,
damningly, of earlier moaning. Village was exposed.
It had just needed stories that were a bit better.
People simply hadn’t liked articles about how the Cli-
mate Act wasn’t justiciable or how the government was
still using false figures on housing output.
Then, just when the magazine had learnt its lesson
and was promising sleuthing and even scheduled pub-
lication dates, came Post-Covid penury, compounding
the foolishness of maintaining a hard-copy format, and
exacerbated by the government’s vindictive abolition
of VAT for our rivals, news papers.
And worse: from almost nowhere there burst forth
Ditch, or the Ditch or on the Ditch or hurling on the
ditch, whatever it’s called. Roughly speaking a scion
of Village, steered by friends of the magazine, running
the same story as Village (failure to observe the plan-
ning regulations) but better: with two comprehensible
ideas per page instead of ten incomprehensible ones;
nice coherent green graphics and a sensible approach
of only publishing when a very good story comes
together, and only online. Not all in a lump, under
unrealistic all-nighter deadline with typesetters whin-
ing about needing to go home and no lawyer in sight
to extract the last defamations.
Micheál Martin breaching the regulations, then eve-
ryone else breaking the planning regulations and,
crucially, resignations: Damien English for yet-to-be-
prosecuted fraud in the planning process, Robert Troy
for up to eight unlawfully undeclared rental properties,
the chairman of Bord Pleanála (though part of that
might have been Village, derivative and slipstream-
ing), for sleepfulness at the wheel, and nearly Niall
Collins for lies but no fraud. The one, the only one,
Ditch let away. What a record in two years! No wonder
Heather Humphreys told them to “Fuck O” and the
Indo reported that a minister called it “Fucking Ditch”.
He didn’t call it “Fucking Village” and that is something
we need to change.
The Irish Times, denigrated in these columns as the
suppressor for generations of more hot stories than it
publishes has, apparently, 421 employees. So how
does Ditch, with two employees, do it?
The overarching head start for the fuckers in the
Ditch is its sponsor’s original vision which was of anar-
chic muck-raking, a salutary non-discipline that would
make any endeavour dicult to deal with for its foes.
As to its modus operandi, Village hears reports of well-
chosen whistleblowers who’ve fed key lowdowns to
Ditch, but the central truth is that Ditch simply knows
how to spot a gombeen — the ones with more than one
face coming at you at a time, behind bad hair – and it
knows the dodgiest are over-promoted junior minis-
ters, and it above all knows the overriding truths that
almost everyone in Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael likes a
spot of one-o housery, of bit-on-the-side develop-
ment or of accidental landlordism, to be going on with.
And that a percentage of the most successful will break
the law to do it and they can be caught because they’re
eejits.
There’s something else. Sages have noted that one
of the Ditch journalists was a paralegal. Those boys
can travel intrepidly around the country, put up with
any boredom, go through any files, even insurance
ones, and probably know ‘people in those oces’ in
the first place, to alert them. To the good stu.
Village hasn’t been doing any of this though it knew
the gombeens too, knows them. Basically it couldn’t
cart itself down to the planning or departmental
oces, fill in those endless thwartable FoI requests,
doorstep those greasy delinquents at their constitu
-
ency oces. It just keeps on with the whistleblower
stu: Sean Quinn, the Banking Inquiry, endless gardaí.
On and on.
They’ve shown up everyone, starting with the Irish
Times with its 421 mostly news-non-breaking time-
servers and ending with Village with its lack of
everything except whistleblowers; and No, it won’t do.
So what are we doing to do about it? Times have
changed (not the Irish or Sunday ones of course). Vil-
lage will keep its role as whistleblowee but from now
on it’s going to send out anyone who’ll listen to far-
flung oces, to correlate files with ethics registers, to
see what marks ocials indiscreetly leave to highlight
the pressures they come under, and the compromises
they’ve made. To leave no track unfollowed. To balm
the aches of envy. To earn your subscriptions and bring
in an employee. To investigate.
Village Magazine will be publishing every two months
for the rest of the year and beyond, with new resolve.
EDITORIAL
Issue 79
April 2023
Chllenging he endemiclly
complcen nd ohers by
he cue promoion of
equliy, susinbiliy nd
ccounbiliy
ONLINE
www.villgemgzine.ie
@VillgeMgIRE
EDITOR
Michel Smih
edior@villgemgzine.ie
DEPUTY EDITOR
J Vivin Cooke
REPORTER
Róisín O’She
DESIGN AND PRODUCTION
Lenny Rooney
ADVERTISING
sles@villge.ie
PRINTERS
Boylns, Droghed,
Co Louh
VILLAGE IS PUBLISHED BY
Ormond Quy Publishing
Ormond Quy Upper,
Dublin
d itch and Village
