Up their own ileum - Village Magazine

18June 2015

N , I wrote in Village that

Denis O’Brien, Ireland’s most

powerful media owner was exer-

cising an extraordinarily chilling

eﬀect on journalism and journal-

ists after grossly negative ﬁndings

against him in the Moriarty Tribunal. I

detailed his litigious “promiscuity”:

how a large number of Ireland’s best-

known journalists including Eamon

Dunphy, Sam Smyth, Elaine Byrne as

well as Transparency International had

been threatened by Denis O’Brien and

were not keen to comment on his aﬀairs

after that. Anne Harris, then editor of

the Sunday Independent, claimed that

 journalists have received legal letters

from Denis O’Brien in the previous ten

years.

In  O’Brien had obtained an

injunction stopping the Sunday Times

publishing conﬁdential details of his

business relationship with cash-short

Paddy McKillen. In  he was to be

awarded €, by the High Court

after the Irish Mail questioned his phi-

lanthropy. The late and distinguished

Paul Drury had written that O’Brien

“kept popping up” on RTÉ news to pro-

mote his image “set to be tarnished by a

pending report of the Moriarty tribu-

nal”. It was, Drury wrote, an “ingenious

feint”. Unfortunately for the Mail, this

view of the facts did not hold up.

In May this year O’Brien successfully

obtained an injunction stopping RTÉ

from broadcasting a report relating to

his private and conﬁdential banking

aﬀairs with Irish Bank Resolution Cor-

poration (IBRC) which he claimed

breached his privacy rights and would

cause him incalculable commercial

damage. RTÉ had opposed the injunc-

tion on grounds including the right to

freedom of expression and public inter-

est. It also argued the courts should be

slow to interfere with legitimate jour-

nalistic judgment. Binchy J in the High

Court resolved the matter – reasonably

it seems to me – on the basis the “court

must take account of the fact that very

little, if any, connection has at this stage

been established between the public

interest in alleged failure of corporate

governance at IBRC and Mr O’Brien’s

personal dealings with IBRC”.

It seems to me that Mr O’Brien takes

good legal cases and threatens others

that are not so good. This does not

mean he will win every case anyone is

brave enough to defend against him.

For example, the most notable thing

about O’Brien, apart from the fact he is

Ireland’s richest man, is that he made

two payments to then Minister Lowry,

in  and , totalling approxi-

mately £,, and supported a loan

of Stg£, given to Lowry in

. The Moriarty tribunal found that

the payments from O’Brien were

“demonstrably referable to the acts and

conduct of Mr Lowry”, acts which ben-

eﬁted Esat Digifone. In , O’Brien

informed Village that “I take very seri-

ous objection to the use of the word

‘corruption’ in the context of my

involvement in the licence process. This

Moriarty Tribunal (very deliberately)

made no reference whatsoever of cor-

ruption in any aspect relating to me

when it came to publishing its report”.

However, I concluded in the  arti-

cle that it was “not clear that the

payments to Lowry were not indeed

susceptible to a ﬁnding that they were

towards the corruption end of the

impropriety continuum”.

So...you can say Denis O’Brien

behaved “towards the corruption end of

the impropriety continuum”. What you

cannot do is say he is feigning philan-

thropy, for he is a generous man. Or

print leaked documents about his bank-

ing aﬀairs, since no-one expects their

NEWS Denis O’Brien

Up their own ileum

Ireland’s media are spineless and legally clueless about Denis O’Brien, as well as Dermot

Desmond and the Ansbacher dossier. By Michael Smith

June 2015 19

private banking aﬀairs to appear in the

media – unless presumably there is

some impropriety or scandal, which had

not been shown in the case O’Brien won

in May.

The media tend to see it otherwise.

But the media have form in cowardice.

For years they have also largely abjured

reportage on the aﬀairs of Dermot Des-

mond who was hammered in the

Glackin report and implicated in the

unsavoury funding of former Taoiseach

Charles Haughey in the Moriarty Tribu-

nal, but who had ratcheted up a large

number of defamation successes over

the years. And all the media failed to

report the thrust of the “Ansbacher dos-

sier” in which a conservative

Department of Enterprise “authorised

oﬃcer” documented an apparent con-

spiracy to keep the identities of a large

number of powerful people associated

with unethical or illegal oﬀshore

accounts, out of the light of investiga-

tion or the glare of publicity. That issue

was obfuscated on the issue of the

naming in the Dáil last year by Mary

Lou McDonald of six mostly well-known

alleged depositors in Ansbacher

accounts. Village uniquely published the

dossier but did not name these people.

All other media failed in their responsi-

bility to report and explicate the serious

allegations of conspiracy, and certainly

did not print the dossier. To this day

they still substitute for publication and

investigation a denigration of Mary Lou

McDonald’s availing of parliamentary

privilege. Ms McDonald was right to use

the privilege but it would have been

better if she had focused on the appar-

ent conspiracy not the headline names.

RTÉ, of course, has form: in  it

largely ignored the Lowry Tapes, in

which Lowry admitted to having paid

€, additional to what he told the

Moriarty Tribunal, to land agent Kevin

Phelan, leaving it to the privately-owned

TV to broadcast them. Elaine Byrne

who originally broke the Tapes story

reckons RTÉ in total devoted only “

minutes, incidental” coverage to the

tapes before she gave them to the Vin-

cent Browne show.

Defending RTÉ David Nally, Manag-

ing Editor, RTÉ Current Aﬀairs,

contended that the Lowry Tape “got the

coverage it deserved” and “does not

advance the story signiﬁcantly beyond

the ﬁndings of the Moriarty Tribunal”,

even though the tape seems to show that

Lowry perjured himself and raises ques-

tions as to where his company got the

covered-up €, to pay Kevin

Phelan.

And of course RTÉ caved in and paid

out surprisingly readily, when members

of the Iona Institute threatened it with

defamation actions after Panti Bliss

called members “homophobes” on

Brendan O’Connor’s ‘Saturday Night

Show’.

Taking these messages (and these and

other payouts) for received wisdom,

noting the abjectness of many of their

eminent colleagues and underpinned by

no great reserves of imagination, appli-

cation, knowledge or backbone, the

message has gone out to Ireland’s broad-

casters and Ireland’s newspapers: “don’t

say anything negative about ‘Denis” or

you’ll be sued and lose. Don’t even men-

tion the Dail-sanctioned Moriarty

Tribunal unless you give similar weight

to the disputatious views of Ireland’s

richest man”.

Onto this lethal background then

came the decision of one of Ireland’s

soberest TDs, Independent Catherine

Murphy, to read details of Denis

O’Brien’s banking arrangements into

the Dáil record. Now this cast the

matter into a diﬀerent orbit. A member

with a democratic mandate was taking

the matter way beyond the constitu-

tional realm that applied to a leaked

document received by RTÉ (as in the

ﬁrst Binchy J case).

For this matter is constitutionally

protected. The constitution is clear

(Article .): “All oﬃcial reports

and publications of the Oireachtas or

of either House thereof and utter-

ances made in either House wherever

published shall be privileged”.

Democracy requires that the public

hears what its elected representatives

have to say, for without a record, how

can their debates be relevant. Further-

more. If anything a TD says is improper

it should be stopped by the Ceann Com-

hairle, if necessary by clearing the

House and getting agreement by demo-

cratic vote for the record to be struck

out. If it is false it should be stopped or if

this is not practical there should be

aggressive sanctions agreed by the

House including barring the member

from the House for a suitable period. But

in a democracy you can’t silence parlia-

ment. You really can’t.

It was in this spirit after hearing that

Broadsheet.ie had posted the proceed-

ings, which in substance implied that

O’Brien got favourable treatment from

state-owned IBRC for his banking – and

was facing legal threats, that Village

posted them on its own website and

undertook to publish them in the maga-

zine when it was published [which we

duly do on page ]. This was not brave

for there was no real chance that any

judge would interfere with the Constitu-

tionally-prescribed right. The organs of

state tend to avoid precipitating foolish

constitutional crises.

Shockingly I heard that RTÉ, the Irish

Times and the Journal.ie had removed

the material from their websites or were

not broadcasting it. The Independent

group, in which O’Brien holds .%,

was of course never going to publish.

It seems to me that in a democracy

these media should have maintained

their rights, and seen if they were chal-

lenged in court. Instead they folded in

panic, some of them even before they

And all the

media failed

to report the

thrust of the

“Ansbacher

dossier”

in which a

conservative

Department

of Trade

“authorised

oﬃcer”

documented

an apparent

conspiracy

to keep the

identities of a

large number

of powerful

people

associated

with unethical

or illegal

oﬀshore

accounts, out

of the light of

investigation

or the glare of

publicity

“