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VILLAGEApril/May
OPINION JOHN WATERS
Biased media, including some
cowardly Irish Times journalists,
sought to avail of a baseless
charge of homophobia to bury me,
wilfully ignoring the fact that RTÉ
could have settled the matter at an
early stage with an apology and no
damages. By John Waters
Waters after the deluge
against David Norris, which in turn led to me
being called a homophobe by a guest on the
‘Vincent Browne Tonight’ programme.
Recognising the use of the word ‘homo-
phobe’ as a long-standing instrument of
censorship I immediately consulted my
solicitor, Kevin Brophy, who made con-
tact with both organisations. The Vincent
Browne programme agreed to broadcast an
apology; the Irish Times essentially refused
to apologise and more or less told me to
sue if I wanted to. I decided not to, on the
grounds that I was continuing to work for
the newspaper, and TV had issued a rea-
sonable and timely apology. In neither case
had I raised any issue of damages, nor, in the
case of TV, did I seek even my legal costs.
(In the recent controversy, “RTÉ could have
saved its licence-payers €, plus legal
costs, had it responded as TV did on that
occasion.)
The following weekend, the Irish Mail on
Sunday carried an interview with Christine
Buckley (recently deceased), the former
institutional abuse survivor and cam-
paigner. She said “Senator Norris does not
appear to see the moral dilemma in abus-
ing a child, the psychological impact, the
emotional impact, the shattered life”. As a
supporter of David Norris in his battles on
behalf of homosexuals, she said, she felt a
sense of betrayal.
Although I had been called a homophobe
for similar interventions, Christine Buckley
was not accused of homophobia – the inter-
view was simply ignored by all other Irish
media outlets. Until then, it would have
seemed unthinkable that any contributions
of hers on the subject of paedophilia would
be ignored – but this one was.
‘Homophobia’, of course, is a multi-faceted
word. It has been widely used by gay rights
activists as an instrument of attack and
demonisation. The word also has strong con-
notations of an imputed aversion towards,
indeed hatred of, homosexuals based on a
fear of same-sex attraction which the per-
son exhibiting the prejudice may detect, and
seek to suppress, within himself.
But it was Brendan O’Connor, not Rory
O’Neill, who introduced the word “homo-
phobia” – and went on to invite O’Neill to
name names on the ‘Saturday Night Show’.
It was when O’Connor asked “Who are
they?” that O’Neill replied: “Well the obvi-
ous ones… Breda O’Brien today, oh my God
banging on about gay priests and all, like the
John Waterses and all those people, the Iona
Institute crowd. I mean I just, I just, feck off
and get the hell out of my life” (applause from
the audience).
The defamation entered in with the
“It will never be known what acts of cow-
ardice have been committed for fear of not
looking sufficiently progressive”
Charles Péguy
T
HOSE with whom I’ve been bundled
over the course of the past three
months would have good reason to
accuse me of draft-dodging on the gay mar-
riage issue. I had been avoiding becoming
embroiled in that issue, not least because
my views on the subject are rather compli-
cated. Contrary to what Rory O’Neill implied
on the ‘Saturday Night Show’ of January
, I had not been regularly appearing on
television panels with the view of destroy-
ing his happiness.
Having named me as one of the people
attacking his happiness – ‘The obvious ones’
– O’Neill went on: “I mean, what astounds
me is that there are people out there in the
world who devote quite a large amount of
their time and energy to try and stop peo-
ple, you know, achieving happiness and
that is what people like the Iona Institute
are at”. Apart altogether from the ‘homo-
phobe’ slur, this was objectively untrue, at
least in as far as it related to myself, and I
state this merely as an irrefutable fact. Only
three or four days earlier, I had declined an
invitation from ‘Vincent Browne Tonight’,
to talk about a recent statement by former
president Mary McAleese about gays and the
Catholic Church. In fact, although I had been
a regular guest on Browne’s show on RTÉ
Radio One up until about a decade ago, I had
only once appeared on his TV programme.
One of my reasons for declining to appear
was Browne’s consistently aggressive dis-
missiveness of any or all of my arguments
concerning fathers and children.
Smears about me and homophobia began
three years ago, during the early stages of
the presidential election, when the
retired journalist Helen Lucy Burke went
public with her concerns about an interview
she had conducted with presidential can-
didate David Norris a decade before. Burke
immediately found herself targeted by gay-
rights activists and journalists seeking to
prevent her airing these concerns which
related to Norris’s alleged views on paedo-
philia. On seeing this, I wrote about the issue
in my Irish Times column, recalling the facts
of my own involvement, as consultant edi-
tor of Magill in , in working with Helen
Lucy Burke to try to persuade David Norris
to withdraw his comments about paedo-
philia from the interview before publication.
My writing on this subject led to a scurril-
ous article in the Irish Times, in which I was
accused of being part of a smear campaign
acquiescence of O’Neill in O’Connor’s prof-
fering of the word “homophobic” and this
was in only the slightest degree mitigated
by the fact that O’Connor’s motive appeared
to be to defend me against the accusation he
detected O’Neill to be making. “I don’t know.
I don’t know”, O’Connor interjected. “I know
one of the people that you mentioned there
wh ich i s John Water s. I wouldn’t have t houg ht
that John Waters is homophobic[?]”.
If Rory O’Neill had offered any remotely
germane evidence of his opinion – that, for
example, I had spoken or written anything
that he, however implausibly, was deem-
ing “homophobic” (for example, if he had
dragged up the now notorious ‘satire’ quote
in which I suggested that the preoccupation
with gay marriage indicates a wonky prior-
itising of concerns relating to family while
father-child rights continue to be ignored),
RTÉ might have had at least a presentable
defence of honest opinion. He didn’t – he
cited nothing I had said or written at all –
and so RTÉ was left utterly defenceless.
I remember one occasion I was myself on
the ‘Saturday Night Show’ when Brendan
O’Connor seemed to be rushing headlong
through the pretty lengthy agenda. He also
appeared to be somewhat preoccupied dur-
ing the interview, looking away as though
distracted by something and leaving me
talking to his ear. Afterwards I asked him
what had happened, and he said: “I had a
voice in my ear telling me to move on!”.
The question is: where was the voice
in Brendan’s ear during the Rory O’Neill
interview?
I made contact by text with Brendan
O’Connor before the end of the programme
telling him that I believed the interview had
been defamatory. Later that night, both
O’Connor and his producer Larry Masterson
texted me to tell me I could come on the show
the follow ing week to respond to what O’Neil l
had said. Since this would have amounted to
me going on to protest against an accusation
that had been made without substantiation
or evidence, I would have been reduced to
responding by, for example, listing my gay
friends, or telling about the numbers of gay
people whom I’d helped in relation to chil-
dren or whatever – in effect analogous to
issuing assurances that I’d stopped beating
my wife. On the Sunday, my lawyer wrote to
RTÉ asking that urgent attention be given
to removing the defamatory content from
the repeat of the programme going out that
evening, and that the programme be taken
down from the RTÉ player. The repeat went
out unedited.
I took a telephone call from Larry
Masterson a few days later, in the course of
April/May VILLAGE
VILLAGEApril/May
which it emerged that he (and undoubtedly
others) had spent the previous couple of days
trawling the internet in search of evidence
retrospectively to validate what Rory O’Neill
had said. He made a reference to an inter view
with a college magazine from which about
half-a-dozen half phrases would later be
extracted in an effort retrospectively to sub-
stantiate the charge of homophobia against
me, utterly ignoring that the substance of
the interview was to do with the neglect of
the mutual rights of fathers and children. In
general, though, he appeared to believe the
trawl had not been a great success.
That Wednesday, in consultation with me
(and also, I believe several members of the
Iona Institute – of which, for the avoidance
of all doubt, I am not now and never have
been a member), Kevin Brophy drafted an
apology which was sent to RTÉ’s lawyers.
When a controversy broke out some two
weeks later about the payment of damages,
RTÉ claimed that this apology had been “too
long”. However, they did not raise this objec-
tion at the time.
In due course it became clear that they
had a mysterious difficulty with the final
sentence of the apology, which for me and
the others was crucial to the issue of proper
redress. It read: “We accept that it is an
important part of democratic debate that
people must be able to hold dissenting views
on controversial issues without characteri-
sations of malice, hatred or bad faith”.
Over the coming days or so, Kevin
Brophy was to submit several variations on
this apology, all of which were rejected. All
wordings proposed by RTÉ, apart from being
lame and laden with weasel words, notably
excluded any approximation of that final
sentence. This was puzzling, since the sen-
tence amounts to no more than a summary
of RTÉ’s public responsibility.
RTÉ’s first draft of a proposed apology
arrived after pm on Friday January th,
the latest conceivable hour, rendering it
difficult for me to liaise with Kevin Brophy
or him to liaise with his other clients. It
amounted to no more than an expression of
regret that we had taken offence. I instructed
my lawyer to tell them that, if the ‘apology’
was broadcast in that form, it would make
things worse. Thus did RTÉ fritter away a full
week in which the matter could have been
disposed of with minimal cost.
The following day I texted Bob Collins,
Chairman of the Broadcasting Authority of
Ireland (BAI) of which I had been a member
since its inception in , resigning.
On the Monday RTÉ’s attitude hardened
and it started engaging in crypto-philosoph-
ical debate about the rights and wrongs of
the issue. The tic-tacking concerning the
apology continued also. I instructed Kevin
Brophy to inform RTÉ that, if they wished to
debate the matter, they could do so in front
of a judge and jury. It was at that point that
they began to take the matter seriously. They
agreed an apology and settlement with Iona
and I was asked if I was prepared to accept
the new apology as drafted. I said I was not
entirely happy with the new wording, but in
deference to the Iona members agreed that
it could go ahead provided adequate dam-
ages were paid. RTÉ at first made me an offer
of €,, and, following a brief negotia-
tion between the lawyers, it was agreed that I
would be paid a sum of €, in damages.
I was informed that a total of €, would
be paid to the members of Iona.
Damages are the way this society has
decided to compensate citizens for injury to
their reputations. There is no other measure
of the gravity of something except the whole-
heartedness of an apology and the quantum
of money paid in damages. Still, if RTÉ had
behaved with courtesy and good faith from
the beginning of the negotiations, the mat-
ter would have been settled a week earlier,
as with the TV libel in . I would have
received no damages, nor, as several times in
the past, would I have asked for any.
The most immediate and arresting aspect
of the deluge was the hundreds of emails that
started to arrive. Rather than extend the
following random selection the considera-
tion of separate paragraphs, I’ve run them
together, separating discrete emails with
asterisks:
“You’re a fucking homophobe.* Have the
decency to apologize to Panti, and then
drop off the face of the earth. *Fuck you, you
worthless piece of shit. And, fuck, you are
damn ugly too. Cut that dirty long hair, you
homophobic asshole.* Hi John Just wanted to
tell you everyone in Ireland thinks youre a
bastard. Sinead O Connor is better off hav-
ing nothing to do with you. You are a piss
stain.* I hear you’re a homophobe now John.
Any chance of a few bob please? * You sir are
a not just a bully but a coward.”
And so on and on.
After a few days of this I noticed certain
patterns. The emails consisted entirely of
abuse. On a Wednesday there would be ,
on Thursday none at all, on Friday more
– even though the level of related activ-
ity, including social media commentary,
high-profile international celebrity inter-
ventions and invective in the public arena
had remained constant throughout the
period.
It is not an exaggeration to say that I now
regarded it as unsafe for me to walk down
the street. The number of incidents in which
I was personally confronted or abused was
no more than a handful, and yet the anxiety
they provoked created a sense of helpless-
ness that I had never before experienced as
a journalist or public figure.
I have avoided comment-threads on news-
paper articles, particularly those under my
own Irish Times column. I also don’t Tweet
or read blogs online. This has suited me in
the past, as it meant I received feedback only
from people brave enough to attach their
names to their correspondence.
However avoiding the online cess-
pit became impossible during the frenzy
#Pantigate unleashed. Facts had no place
here and there were three things that
everyone “knew”: Rory O’Neill was a hero;
RTÉ should not have paid out damages; John
Waters/Breda O’Brien and the members of
the Iona Institute were homophobes. End of
“debate”. Anyone who disagreed with these
points was a homophobe too.
The media coverage was in the main
disgraceful.
It was as if there was not merely just one
side to this story, but that the identities of
the good guys were self-evident
from the outset, and those of the
bad guys equally so.
Rather than listing guilty par-
ties, it is far easier to name the
handful who, to varying extents
and in different ways, upheld the
honourable tradition of journal-
ism. These included Noel Whelan,
George Hook, Sarah Carey, Pat
Leahy and Matt Cooper.
But I can say that the only
times I have encountered a neg-
ative personal response were in
Dublin, southside Dublin, invar-
iably from people who seemed
to have no more than slogans to
work with and always hurried
away after flinging their quan-
tum of abuse.
Otherwise, most people
seemed to be only vaguely aware
that my name had been associ-
ated with something to do with
homosexuals.
I don’t think it should be
necessar y, when wr iting abut importa nt con-
troversial issues, to continually restate one’s
position in order to safeguard against disin-
genuous characterisations. But, in the times
we have arrived in, it appears that one can-
not assume anything, and must constantly
be on guard against distortion and dishon-
esty. So, for the avoidance of all doubt: I have
nothing proscriptive to say on anything to do
OPINION JOHN WATERS
My argument
is about the
maintenance of
the blood link
between parent
and child,
which is really
transcendent
of the marriage
issue per se. I’m
probably better
suited for filing
under “Anti-
marriage” than
under “Anti-
Gay Marriage”
“
April/May VILLAGE
with the personal or sexual life of any human
being. I believe such matters are private and
should remain so. What people do between
the sheets – whatever their sexual orienta-
tion – with other consulting adults is none of
my business. I have never expressed any neg-
ative opinion on homosexuality in any form
whatever. I grew up not just listening to the
music Lou Reed and David Bowie, but avidly
following their cultural crusades – at a time
when the mainstream press in Ireland was
way behind in such matters. I have written
about such figures many times. I think it axi-
omatic that gay people should be regarded
as having equal entitlement to respect and
protection in society. I think it tedious that I
have to state this in such explicit terms, since
it has long been obvious from many things
I’ve written.
The weird thing is that, before the
‘Saturday Night Show’ of January th ,
if you’d put my name together with the word
“gay” into the searchbar of the Irish Times
archive, you would have firstly encountered,
along with several pieces I wrote about the
David Norris “Greek pederasty” contro-
versy of , three topics. You would have
encountered, for example, the piece I wrote
in posthumously restoring the reputa-
tion of a gay man, Finbar Dennehy, who had
been smeared by several newspapers which
claimed he had died as a result of ‘bizarre
sex games’ when in fact he had been brutally
murdered.
The searchers might have come across one
of the pieces I wrote in support of J McD, the
gay ‘sperm donor’ who spectacularly won
his case in the Supreme Court in December
, vindicating his own standing as a
father, but also winning the most emphatic
endorsement of the rights of a single father
in the history of the Irish State. This man had
been abandoned by the LGBT community in
Ireland. Why? Because he found himself in
conflict with two lesbians, for whom he had
naively agreed to supply his sperm on the
agreement that he would be enabled to have
a relationship with his child.
Or they might have come upon a column of
mine from March defending Cardinal
Keith O’Brien of Scotland, who had been
outed as gay by the British ‘liberal’ news-
paper the Observer in relation to several
consensual historical relationships with
seminarians and younger priests.
I argued that there is a need to distinguish
between the right of gay people to practice
their sexuality and the issue of gay marriage:
“It’s true: although liberal media persistently
insinuate that opposition to gay marriage
is ‘homophobic’, many gay men and women
themselves oppose this development.
“Hence”, I concluded, “there is not ipso
facto a conflict between Cardinal O’Brien’s
exercising of his homosexual tendencies and
his opposition to gay marriage”.
For nearly a quarter of a century, I’ve
written an average of two articles per week
– say, , pieces in all. Yet in the search
for evidence against me, all that could be
unearthed were half a dozen half-phrases
in an informal interview for which I was
supposed to be sent quotes for approval,
but was not. And these phrases were delib-
erately manipulated and carefully removed
from their context to the advantage of their
undoubtedly ‘colourful’ character. Surely if I
were the vicious homophobe that the baying
mob have labelled me, I would have used my
columns over the years to campaign against
homosexuality, gay marriage and the ‘happi-
ness’ of gay people like Rory O’Neill?
On Monday January th, five days before
the interview with Rory O’Neill on the
‘Saturday Night Show’, I received an email
from Una Mullally, who had recently become
a regular columnist with the Irish Times. I
had never met nor spoken to Ms Mullally,
though I had been aware that she had
engaged in frequent attacks on me while a
columnist with the doomed Sunday Tribune
some years before.
In her friendly email to me, Mullally
claimed to be looking for dissenting voices
for a book she was writing about the move-
ment for marriage equality in Ireland.
I responded as follows:
Dear Una,
…In principle, I’m not really bothered
about what’s called gay marriage. I do hap-
pen to believe that marriage is, ipso facto,
something that happens between a man and
a woman, but this is a position in principle,
and in reality what is nowadays called mar-
riage has long since moved beyond this. My
remaining issues relate only to children,
which is to say adoption. I believe we have
inverted the pyramid of adoption logic from
a provision designed to provide a child who
had lost his or her parents through death
or other calamity with a home situation
approximating to a normative family, to
something that is really calculated to com-
modify the child for the benefit of couples
who wish to “have a family” though they
cannot have children of their own. My objec-
tion to this sustains regardless of whether
the couple in question is heterosexual or
homosexual
…. You may be surprised to hear that I
don’t have any theological objection to gay
marriage. I have disappointed many’s the
TV and radio researcher in this regard.
I’ve refused almost all requests to become
involved in this debate, partly because my
position is not what people expect and partly
because of the bullying which has character-
ised the discussion from the beginning
… My argument is fundamentally (as it
were) about the maintenance of the blood
link between parent and child, which is
really transcendent of the marriage issue
per se. I have a child but am not married,
and I have never accepted any suggestion
by anyone or by society that
I have an inferior right to a
relationship with my child
on this account. I’ve won this
argument at the personal
level and I’m happy now to
leave it at that. In fact, now
that I think if it, I’m probably
better suited for filing under
“Anti-marriage” than under
“Anti- Gay Marriage”...
I certainly don’t make
these arguments from any of
the conventional positions,
least of all a Catholic one –
although it’s no secret that I
am a Catholic…
[I cannot] recall a single priest, bishop or
pope in the past 18 years uttering a single
sentence that I could even elliptically have
interpreted as supportive of the rights of
fathers and children to enjoy protected
relationships in this (or indeed) any soci-
ety. I believe that this is down to a rather
distorted ideological position arising from
the anachronistic nature of the Holy Family
in the Christian narrative – the fact that St
Joseph was the stepfather of Jesus, rather
than his ‘biological’ father. …
But nor am I convinced by conventional
arguments about the effect gay marriage
will have on the “institution of marriage” as
we know it. I don’t buy the idea that gay mar-
riage will of itself be socially destructive”.
On January th a friend referred me to
an article by Una Mullally in the Irish Times.
I was stunned by the contents of the arti-
cle, which included my name in relation to
the ‘Saturday Night Show’ interview. There
was a reference to a recent statement by the
Russian president Vladimir Putin, when
he said that gays were welcome to come to
Moscow for the Winter Olympics, but should
“leave the children alone”.
Una Mullally wrote: “Teachings of the
Catholic Church on homosexuality are
homophobic. Hopefully these teachings
will evolve, as other teachings have. Most
of the prominent voices in the Irish media
who oppose marriage being extended to
same-sex couples represent a Catholic point
of view, organization, or the Church itself.
There is no
other measure
except the
wholeheartedness
of an apology and
the quantum of
money paid in
damages
“
VILLAGEApril/May
At the time of writing, the performer and
businessman, Rory O’Neill, has received
four solicitor’s letters from associates of
the Iona Institute objecting to a brief discus-
sion of subtle homophobia in Irish society on
Brendan O’Connor’s ‘Saturday Night Show’
on RTÉ. RTÉ also received legal correspond-
ence including a letter on behalf of columnist
John Waters leading them to remove the pro-
gramme from the RTÉ Player”.
I immediately called Denis Staunton, the
Deputy Editor of the Irish Times, and said
I had been alarmed by the splenetic and
defamatory context of the Mullally arti-
cle and by its inaccurate linking of me and
the Catholic perspective. I said it repeated
the ‘Saturday Night Show’ defamation and
lumped me in with Putin and some of the
most egregious episodes of homophobia in
the history of the world. He said he had not
been on duty the previous night and had not
yet read the article. He then proceeded to
do so as I waited. Having read the article,
he appeared to be genuinely shocked and
said that he would not have published the
article had he seen it beforehand. He said
he believed the word homophobia should
be used “sparingly”. I said to him that the
word had a “demonic aura” about it and he
agreed. He asked me what I proposed to do
and said, “Of course it’s open to you to take
the legal route but naturally I’d much prefer
if you didn’t”. He proposed that I write a let-
ter for publication on the Letters page. I was
taken aback by this and said that it might
look odd if a columnist in the Irish Times
was reduced to responding to an attack by
another columnist by means of a letter. He
said it was now Irish Times house policy
that columnists not be seen to be sniping
at one another in their columns. At about
.pm he called me back and said he had
spoken to Una Mullally, who told him she
hadn’t named me in her article. Staunton
said that it appeared that a sub-editor had
added my name – as I understood him, to
provide full disclosure in view of the fact
that I was an Irish Times columnist and my
name had already been mentioned publicly
in this context. Staunton did not, however,
explain why my fellow Irish Times columnist
Breda O’Brien’s name had not been added to
the article, even though her name had been
mentioned publicly also.
I considered the matter carefully and
decided that there would be no point in try-
ing to convey even the essence of what had
occurred in a Letter to the Editor. I therefore
decided to place it in the hands of my lawyer,
with a view to obtaining a published apology
in the Irish Times.
A lot has been made of my history of
winning damages in libel actions, with
strong implications that I have been trig-
ger-happy with solicitors’ letters at the
slightest criticism. This is nonsense. In view
of the customary strategy of prevarication
adopted by media organisations faced with
requests for apologies, I find it easier to deal
with these matters through my solicitor.
In all cases where I have issued proceed-
ings, the false allegations had been of the
utmost gravity and had not been treated as
such by the offending media organisation.
In all cases, moreover, I won the argument,
including one occasion when I was awarded
significant damages by a jury following a
-day trial. In all cases, however, I had
given the organisations in question ample
opportunity to address my complaints by
issuing speedy apologies without any neces-
sity to pay damages or costs.
It is interesting to observe how the gay
marriage campaign has been joined by a
number of high-profile, self-styled liber-
als. Invariably this category of individual
is one with which I have come into conflict
in the past, as these were the loudest voices
of excoriation and silencing I encountered
when I tried to raise the issue of the rights
of children and fathers to have legally pro-
tected relationships.
When I first made these arguments, almost
two decades ago, I was accused of attack-
ing feminists and their ‘achievements’ for
women.
Of course, when I responded to the less-
than-liberal fulminations, they accused me
of being “angry”. Indeed, on one occasion,
the then CEO of Amnesty Ireland told me that
his organisation would have supported me
had I not been so angry. I asked him if there
were any other recorded instances where
Amnesty had rejected a potential client on
this ground.
Among those who regularly attacked me
was my fellow Irish Times columnist Fintan
O’Toole. In , Fintan broke a long silence
on the issue of fathers and children with a
disgraceful piece in his Irish Times column
in which he used a tragedy of the previ-
ous weekend, following which a man and
his child were found stabbed to death, to
condemn those who had highlighted the
unjust treatment of fathers in the family
law system.
It did not surprise me, then, that Fintan
was to take the opportunity afforded by the
‘homophobia’ controversy to stick the boot
in again.
Although I had gathered from the Deputy
Editor that the house policy of the newspa-
per rather severely limited my options in
responding to Una Mullally, the same policy
did not appear to have been conveyed to
Fintan O’Toole who, perhaps a week after
my solicitor had written to the Irish Times
asking for a retraction and apology for the
Mullally assault, wrote a column under the
heading “Columnist’s position comes with
obligations”. He related a ludicrous story
where the Sunday Times outrageously
(apparently) suggested that he drove away
from an engagement – as MC at an Irish
Congress of Trade Unions rally against the
bank bailout – in a series BMW. “The impli-
cation”, he wrote, “was pretty clear: I was a
hypocritical, champagne socialist, stirring
up the masses from a position of wealth and
privilege”. Fintan went on to demonstrate
how wrong the story was: he didn’t own a
series BMW or any kind of car. He couldn’t
drive and had gone home that evening, as
always, on the number bus.
The profile, he said, was a gold mine. “I
had hit the libel jackpot”.
But then Fintan remembered something:
he is a national newspaper columnist, who
occupies “a position of enormous privilege”
in the scheme of protecting free speech.
In Fintan’s case the Sunday Times’ Irish
editor ”agreed pretty quickly that the arti-
cle was inaccurate and indefensible. It was
taken off the paper’s website and a retraction
was published the following week”.
Fintan was spared the terrible conundrum
of having to decide what to do if the editor
had told him to go take a running jump at
himself, or sought to initiate a philosophical
debate about the gravity of being accused of
being able to drive. Fintan did not say what
he would have done then.
Yet, a little further down, Fintan appeared
to acknowledge that the decision about
whether to proceed with a legal action for
defamation depends on the nature of the
response to the initial complaint: “the threat
of a possible libel action is implicit in these
affairs”. In other words, he appeared to be
implying, without admitting it, that if the
editor of the Sunday Times had not been
so accommodating, events might well have
taken a different course.
OPINION JOHN WATERS
Rory
O’Neill
April/May VILLAGE
I agree with his assertion of the journal-
ist’s duty to protect freedom of expression.
That’s why I believe that, when necessary,
journalists as much as others should exercise
their full legal entitlements when nothing
else succeeds: for only in this way is it some-
times possible to protect one’s voice from
bullies and liars who seek to take advantage
of the alleged ‘privileged’ positions of their
opponents by claiming a right to demonise
and defame them with impunity.
Fintan went on: “If, for example, you
want to be free to call the National Women’s
Council “feminazis” or suggest that atheists
are not fully human, you need a robust sense
of where the limits of acceptable polemic
lie”.
It was here that I became fairly sure that
Fintan was talking about me.
I used the word “feminazi” twice in total,
and the word “feminazism” once, in my Irish
Times column, always in a general context to
summon up a particular kind of man-hating
feminism and its impact on culture. I have
never used it to describe any individual or
organisation.
Equally wearisomely familiar, and
equally unfounded, was Fintan’s accusa-
tion that I had described atheists as “less
than human”.
It never happened.
Yet it is ‘remembered’ so well that even
the Literary Editor of the Irish Times has
become certain that I said or wrote it.
In my Irish Times column on November
th , I wrote as follows: “Religion,
rather than just another ‘category’ is the
guiding hypothesis that makes sense of the
whole… . What is called secularism, there-
fore, strikes not merely at specific religions,
or even religions in general, but at the very
capacity of humans to be human”. Readers
can decide for themselves if this is the same
thing as stating that atheists are ‘less than
human’.
More intriguing than even his poor mem-
ory is the way Fintan characterised the role
of newspaper columnist as a “privilege”.
Unlike Fintan, who received a university
education at the expense of the State (luck-
ily, if I’m wrong about this, it’s okay, since
Fintan never sues), I came to journalism the
hard way. Before I earned a decent week’s
wage as a journalist, I spent six years work-
ing for next to nothing, honing my craft
while driving a mailcar to keep body and
soul in the same dimension. I regard myself
as privileged to be breathing, to have been
given life, to have a beautiful daughter, a
beautiful girlfriend, even a beautiful Alfa
Romeo. But I am not ‘privileged’ to have been
writing a column in the Irish Times for the
past years. That’s been my job – no more
and no less.
The ‘homophobe’ deluge might have been
bearable if the Irish Times had behaved with
a scintilla of integrity during it. Instead, it
seemed to join gleefully in the witch-hunt,
publishing a series of outrageously one-
side articles directed at me or the Iona
Institute, sometimes carrying splenetic or
sarcastic asides in articles which had noth-
ing to do with the controversy. There were
also frequent attacks on me by Irish Times
‘colleagues’ on Twitter, most notably the
Consumer Affairs Editor Conor Pope, who
had been tweeting in a derisive fashion about
me, which I believe to be in direct contraven-
tion of the Irish Times social media policy.
Following an intervention on my behalf, the
Deputy Editor Denis Staunton instructed
Pope to remove these tweets, which he did.
On February th, a review of a movie by the
paper’s film critic Donald Clarke included the
following sentence: “Given recent, unhappy
developments in domestic discourse, there
could hardly be a better time for a film about
a homophobic jerk – partly fictionalised and
entirely dead, so he can’t sue”.
Nothing was done to discourage or inhibit
the attacks. This was the newspaper for
which I’d worked for years. These peo-
ple knew me and knew how far off the mark
the depiction of me as a homophobe was.
Everyone sat there enjoying the spectacle
of me being savaged.
On February th, in the wake of Fintan
O’Toole’s utterly cowardly and disgraceful
attack, I resigned as a columnist with the
Irish Times by sending an email to Denis
Staunton at midnight. Staunton was my
sole point-of-contact in the newspaper, the
editor having all but ignored me since his
appointment in .
Following a discussion between Denis
Staunton and Kevin Brophy, I agreed to put
my resignation “on ice” and continue with a
five-week leave period I’d negotiated to work
on two books I was writing.
I believe I would have eventually with-
drawn my resignation, as Denis Staunton
indicated he wanted me to do, had it not been
for what happened next.
Perhaps the most sinister development
over the course of the entire saga was
the unearthing of the phantom tweeter,
Thomas. This individual was first brought
to my attention by two friends of mine, who
are a lot more internet-savvy than I am. At
that stage he had just five followers, though
this had increased to at the time of
writing.
Thomas had a lot of pretty coruscat-
ing things to say about me, Breda O’Brien
and the Iona Institute, and was a follower
of PantiBliss, Rory O’Neill’s Twitter handle.
On January th, he tweeted @PantiBliss:
“don’t worry Panti… the same crew do it all
the time. It’s about intimidation… can’t win
the argument? Send a solicitor’s letter”.
On January th, he tweeted:
“Let’s face it folks. Neither blacks,
Catholics or gays should be allowed marry.
And I’m not a racist, a bigot or a homophobe.
Just reasonable”.
On February th, he tweeted:
“Panti in Wednes Indo. Won’t happen in
Times. Complaints from Breda O’B and legal
action by J Waters over Una Mullally Panti
article January 27 (sic)”.
On February th:
“Beginning to wonder whether a part
of me, just a part… might be
Ionaphobic. Can this be cured
too?”.
That same evening, he also
tweeted:
“Iona Institute and J Waters
denounce UN for anti Catholic
‘bigotry’. ‘Disappointed’ at its
condemnation of child abuse and
Magdalen Launderies”.
On February th he tweeted:
“By the Waters of Babble-
on-and-on... I lay down and
wept...and wept...and wept...
floodwaters....”
My internet sleuths followed
Thomas’s tweets back to
the point when he initiated his
Twitter account. There they
found that, either carelessly or
naively, he had given away his
true identity in several ways,
including by supplying his work
email address for someone he
was requesting to contact him. He had also
neglected to disable the GPS facility on his
mobile device, which meant that, every time
he tweeted, he revealed his precise location
– sometimes his flat in southside Dublin,
sometimes his local public house, and some-
times the offices of the Irish Times on Tara
Such attacks
were provoked
out of the
deeply noxious
atmosphere
of antagonism
inside the Irish
Times, growing
exponentially
worse in
the years
since Kevin
O’Sullivan
became Editor
“
Fintan
O’Toole
VILLAGEApril/May
Street, Dublin. Thomas was revealed in all
his glory as a longtime senior correspondent
with the Irish Times.
It was clear that Thomas was not au
fait with Twitter, and was under the impres-
sion that he was completely anonymous. He
seemed to relish how this allowed him to leak
classified information, most notably when
he tweeted Conor Pope – who was not a fol-
lower of his and did not appear to know who
he was – to inform him that I had sent the IT
a solicitor’s letter to the Irish Times follow-
ing the Una Mullally article of January th.
This was puzzling: if he wanted to acquaint
his colleague of this important develop-
ment, why not just pick up the phone or send
a text?
More than anything else, these tweets con-
firmed the existence of a highly toxic climate
of illiberal antagonism towards particular
viewpoints at the heart of the Irish Times’
editorial operation. The Thomas tweets
also left beyond doubt that this supposedly
objective correspondent was encumbered by
an outright ideological bias which ought to
disqualify him from writing as a reporter on
some at least of the matters he was required
to cover for the newspaper.
On February th I sent a comprehensive
portfolio on Thomas in an email to the
Editor of the Irish Times, Kevin O’Sullivan
and Denis Staunton. I drew attention to
the implications for the reputation of the
Irish Times as a voice of diversity and bal-
ance in Irish society, revealing the identity
of the individual in question. I supplied
texts of numerous tweets by Thomas and
indicated the identities of several of his ‘fol-
lowers’, including Fintan O’Toole.
Thomas continued to tweet. On
February th he tweeted: “O dear. New
poll says % Irish people favour same sex
marriage. Breda O’Brien, John Waters, Iona
Institute heading for Uganda”.
Having received no response from the
Editor or his Deputy, I emailed again on
February st. The following day, February
nd, Thomas tweeted: “One has been
rumbled by HO. …but does one care? Non.
Who wants such cruel friends?”.
Over the next ten days some of the most
noxious tweets relating to me were deleted
– gradually and almost imperceptibly – from
Thomas’s Twitter feed.
What was somewhat perplexing from my
point of view was that the individual I now
knew to be the author of these tweets had
been a long-time friend of mine. In fact, it
was I who tipped him off, many years ago,
that there was a job going in the Irish Times
that might suit him.
He even put me up in his flat for a couple of
weeks one time when my house was flooded
by a burst pipe.
He attended my mother’s funeral in
September , following which we
exchanged friendly emails and even met for a
coffee. After that, we had no engagement for
about nine months, when we had a brief tel-
ephone conversation, during which I asked
him if he would be available as a guest lec-
turer at a forthcoming course in journalism
I was conducting, which invitation he said
he would be happy to accept.
At my mother’s funeral, this individual
embraced my daughter, my girlfriend, my
sisters and me, and briefly, with consider-
able apparent piety, touched my mother’s
dead hand as she lay in her coffin. This is the
gentleman who afterwards sent me several
unctuous emails, talking about his family’s
long relationship with mine. Since those
emails were sent, no fresh difference of opin-
ion had arisen between this person and me.
The only observable provocation for this
extraordinarily toxic development in our
relationship had been Rory O’Neill’s state-
ments on the ‘Saturday Night Show’ and the
fallout that ensued.
It is clear to me that such attacks were pro-
voked out of the deeply noxious atmosphere
of antagonism which had been allowed to
fester towards me for many years inside the
Irish Times, growing exponentially worse
in the years since Kevin O’Sullivan became
Editor.
His craven paralysis on this entire issue,
and in particular his failure to enforce the
company’s own alleged policies and social
media guidelines, if only to protect the
credibility of his newspaper, must call into
question his stature and even his continuing
tenure as Editor.
I have reflected deeply on the conundrum
of whether or not to reveal the true iden-
tity of Thomas. I had some reservations
about doing so, not least because I believe
this individual is acting out of character,
having come under the sway of stronger
personalities within the Irish Times. But,
for two reasons I have decided that naming
him is the more honest course. One is that,
in order to spell out the full implications for
the Irish Times, I need to give such a degree
of detail about him that his identity would
become obvious to virtually anyone who is
familiar with the newspaper. In this con-
text, my failure to name him would then
appear somewhat coy. The second reason
is that I believe such pseudonymous dis-
honest activity, on Twitter and elsewhere
on the internet, is fairly widespread behav-
iour among journalists nowadays, and needs
to be exposed.
For this reason, I say with a heavy heart
that Thomas is the Twitter alias of Patsy
McGarry, Religious Affairs Correspondent
of the Irish Times.
I have now resigned from the Irish Times
with many regrets, but nevertheless cer-
tain of the importance of protesting at the
present drift of the newspaper towards an
ideological orthodoxy that threatens its role
as an esteemed journal of record and a bul-
wark of Irish democracy.
Over the years I’ve been involved in many
intense debates in Irish life. That’s part of
my job as a commentator. But, apart from
the particular unpleasantness of the “homo-
phobia” frenzy, there was also the fact that,
this time, uniquely in my career, I was being
targeted for things other people were say-
ing I had said rather than anything actually
said or written by me. And the nature of
the frenzy – in social media, on blogging
websites like broadsheet.ie, politics.ie and
thejournal.ie, and most shockingly of all
throughout the mainstream media – was
such as to conceal this ungainsayable fact
from the general public.
Anyone with the slightest concern for the
health of Irish democracy must regard the
deluge of hatred more or less stoked by the
‘national broadcaster’ and the Irish Times,
and agitated in the lawless world of social
media into a tsunami of bullying, with the
utmost dismay. By far the most worrying
aspect, however, is that, unless urgent action
is taken by those with the power to take it,
there may soon be no audible voice left to
raise itself against the corrupted clamour of
the unrecognised, unaccountable fifth col-
umn now directing every twitch and nuance
of our public life. What is at issue is not, as
some propose, the validity of any particular
argument, but the capacity of the collective
conversation much longer to accommodate
any kind of argument at all •
OPINION JOHN WATERS
tomfoolery
