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Ireland has a dreadful, inequitable, dangerously failing healthcare system. The State’s answer is the likes of healthy Ireland, which runs a public campaign that, in essence, throws the responsibility for health on to individuals – who seemingly just need help from an initiative to ‘empower and motivate them’. February saw the launching conference – hosted by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) at Facebook Ireland HQ – of a new network, Media Literacy Ireland (disclosure: I’m in it). From the conference stage there was lots of talk about empowerment and not much talk exploring from whom it might be necessary to take power away. There was even a speaker from healthy Ireland, lest the analogy be missed. Don’t be surprised, then, to encounter an Irish campaign in the next year or two imploring you to the media equivalent of ‘eat your vegetables, get some exercise, don’t smoke cigarettes’. Something along the lines of ‘read the Irish Times, trust in Miriam, don’t tweet fake news’. Or maybe not. Media Literacy Ireland potentially has some of the hallmarks of industry-friendly campaigns like Drink Aware and Gamble Aware, plus the involvement of a regulator, the BAI, which might like a campaign that implicitly justifies light-touch regulation abetted by ‘greater public awareness’. On the other hand – and credit to its organisers for this – Media Literacy Ireland has come into being as a genuine network of interested researchers, activists, community-media practitioners and others. And most of us in it are not disposed to frame the problem with Irish media as one of public credulousness, to be addressed by offering tips for spotting ‘extremism’ online. Regular readers will know my view: that media (like healthcare) have a capitalism problem, and that everything from fake news to clickbait to inadequate investigative resources to Denis O’Brien ows from that basic source. But you don’t have to agree with me and name the underlying problem as capitalism to understand that there are structural causes for crises such as the one that erupted recently over Government ‘advertorial’. “I believe the Government is attempting to exploit the difficulties many local and regional titles are facing to promote their party interests”, said no less a media critic than Fianna Fáil’s Timmy Dooley, the party’s spokesman on communications. (How sweetly old-fashioned that word ‘communications’ can sound as it grapples with the changing world.) Media literacy, if it is to be of any use, has to do more than implore us to look for the little ‘special feature’ tag on the top of a piece of paid corporate or government puffery, then to regard the ‘journalism’ below with due scepticism. It must mean understanding ‘the difficulties’ for all journalism that operates in the current market, especially one in which technological change has accelerated existing trends toward blurred lines, and in which advertisers have alternatives to local and regional newspapers when it comes to reaching eyeballs. If the most poignant aspect of that brief, quickly snowed-under ‘Ireland 2040’ crisis was the image of the Taoiseach issuing guidelines for labelling advertorial content – guidelines of which the most callow intern in a local newsroom should surely already be aware – we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that media have been operating at the edges of such guidelines for decades, for the benefit of advertisers looking to buy a little ersatz editorial credibility. How can this fail to be a lesson about how fragile, at best, any such credibility has become ? As the media may or may not have told you, global research shows trust in media is in tatters – media are less trusted than governments, NGOs, businesses – and Irish people are at the mistrustful end of the distribution. In this context, media literacy can hardly consist of legacy media saying ‘trust us, not them’. What can be done ? (Yes, short of getting rid of capitalism.) Anyone who has worked in a newsroom knows what a frightening prospect it would be to try to earn the public’s trust with transparency and accountability about our editorial practices. On a daily basis, contingent and incomplete information is transformed into definitive statements of ringing certitude. That’s one sausage factory we don’t want you to see inside, especially since the work often consists of sticking our label on someone else’s meat. The irony is that the technology often over-simplistically blamed for creating the journalism crisis has long offered tools for remarkable transparency, tools that most journalists have chosen to use only in limited ways. What if hyperlinks in journalists’ stories led not to dull pages of cross-references or to Wikipedia, but rather to images of documents and notebook pages, audio of interviews, pictures of the journalist in the field ? It can be done and has been done, but the experiments in transparency of the early web – notably the extraordinary 1996 investigative series by the aptly named Gary Webb in the San Jose Mercury news, about the CIA’s involvement in the cocaine trade – have rarely been repeated, let alone built upon. Such transparency would foster media literacy without the onus being placed on the audience. Whether it would foster trust is, of course, a matter of what audiences thought of the practices revealed by transparency. Interactivity and social media mean we have some tools whereby that reaction could be tested and gauged. Dublin Institute of Technology, thankfully, is prepared to put its money where my media-literacy mouth is: it’s funding a project that will will use the Liberty, a student- produced ‘hyperlocal’ newspaper and website for Dublin’s Liberties area, to innovate in the area of journalistic transparency. We’ll employ social media as a forum for sharing ‘the story behind the story’, with tweets, Facebook updates, Youtube videos and Instagram posts that unveil aspects of the production of journalism, from notebook pages to editing history, from who-was-interviewed to who-refused. A doctoral-level researcher will be responsible for implementation, monitoring, community engagement and evaluation of this project, which should help readers to understand better the process of news construction, and help journalists-in-training become accustomed to
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Twenty years ago, Letterkenny gardai sent a request to Garda HQ looking for selected phone records in the county. The request was part of the Donegal Garda inquiry into the death of cattle dealer Ritchie Barron, which was botched and complaints about which, from an extended family, the McBreartys, led to the Morris tribunal. Morris called for wide-ranging reforms in Garda management. These have mostly not materialised. In 1995 Telecom Eireann was busy preparing for privatisation as Eircom, and part of that process included major upgrades to the computer systems involved in recording and billing for telephone calls. Unfortunately for the Donegal gardaí, that meant their requests for phone records were taking forever. The law on Garda access to phone records was written in 1993, following repeated scandals over the bugging of journalists’ phones by Charlie Haughey and his slippery justice minister, Sean Doherty. In its first year, Telecom Éireann received 234 Garda requests for phone records. By 1997 the number of requests annually had grown to 1300. Michael Diffley, the Crime and Security chief superintendent assigned to phone traces, wrote to the company on 30 January 1997 to complain that 503 non-Dublin phone requests were still outstanding from the previous year. An internal Eircom memorandum on 10 February 1997 showed only 45 of 358 Garda requests had been processed between June and September 1996. Things looked better between September and December 1996, with only nine of 224 requests outstanding. However, from December to February 1997, 62 of 117 requests were not completed. The system was erratic at best. In Donegal, as everywhere else, the delays hampered investigations. After a senior officer at a conference on the Barron case complained about the delays, one garda spoke up. His brother-in-law worked at Garda HQ – maybe he could pull a few strings. “I contacted my brother in law, Detective Inspector Patrick Nyhan, who is based in Crime and Security”, garda John O’Toole later told the Morris tribunal. “I explained the situation to him, that we had applied for these through the normal channels, and that we had experienced delays, and that there was frustration, and asked him if he could help us get the phone calls, about the information that we had sought”. O’Toole read off a series of telephone numbers and times to Nyhan, and “asked him if he could speed it up or if he could get the calls”. “And he said he would get back to me. And I think about a week later or a number of days, a week later, he contacted me by phone at the Garda station, and he asked me for the fax number, and he faxed me down information in relation to some of the phone calls. He did say that he was unable to get incoming calls, and was only able to get outgoing calls from some of the numbers”. The fax from Nyhan to O’Toole no longer exists. Since O’Toole did not intend to use it in evidence, and he “wasn’t that happy about the manner in which I obtained it and I didn’t want to hold on to it’ he and another officer ‘decided it be destroyed, and I destroyed that information”. Detective Inspector Patrick Nyhan was not called to give evidence at the tribunal, but he was interviewed by tribunal investigator Michael Finn on 5 October 2004, four days after O’Toole gave his evidence. Nyhan said he asked O’Toole if an official application had been made, and was assured it had. He took down the details, and went to see his chief superintendent Michael Dif ey to “give it a push”, but Diffley was not in his office when he called in. The 1993 Act required that any request for telephone data should come from a chief superintendent, and Diffley was the designated liaison with Telecom Éireann at the time. Nyhan called the GPO Investigation Branch. He spoke to “a fellow who was very helpful”, though he could not recall his name. A week or so later, he received an envelope with a compliment slip through the internal mail system and inside it was “a number of sheets with details of telephone calls”. Nyhan then faxed the sheets to Letterkenny. He said this was the only time he had ever contacted the Investigation Unit looking for telephone records. The word “illegal” is never used in the Morris report to refer to the O’Toole/Nyhan search for phone records. Neither is “unofficial” or “irregular”, both words used at tribunal hearings by barristers as they danced around what O’Toole and Nyhan had done. O’Toole’s own barrister merely referred to “procuring telephone records…through a fast track channel”. The strongest criticism of the operation came from Donegal solicitor Paudge Dorrian who, while questioning O’Toole on behalf of Sergeant John White, said the records were “illegally and improperly obtained”. In his report Justice Morris described the incident as an “informal enquiry”. The “fellow who was very helpful” in the GPO was never identified. Arising out of the incident, the Morris tribunal made two recommendations. Neither has anything to do with protecting customers’ data, as demanded by the Data Protection Act 1988, and safeguarded by the requirements of the Interception of Postal Packets and Telecommunications Messages Act 1993. Instead, the recommendations call on the Communications Regulator to ensure that telephone operators respond quickly to Garda requests, and for the Department of Justice to look into storing phone records data from multiple telecoms providers in “an independent databank”. In other words, the lesson the tribunal gleaned from the bypassing of surveillance safeguards was that An Garda Síochána needed more surveillance powers. Whether those recommendations were needed is a moot point. In 2001, Karlin Lillington had revealed that telecom operators were storing phone records for up to six years, and chief superintendent Diffley had told the Morris tribunal that An Garda Síochána could often access call records within “minutes” of a call being made. The Morris report was published in May 2005, just as the Garda Síochána
