Irish media and scandal discussed at Parnell school

WHISTLE-BLOWERS WERE increasingly approaching public relations companies for advice, the Parnell Summer School heard yesterday.

Terry Prone of the Communications Clinic said many whistleblowers did not know how to go to a newspaper so were getting help from people like her.

However when they would subsequently approach newspapers with a story, a prerequisite tended to be that the story was uncomplicated, easy to understand and highly personalised, she said.

If it needed a lot of unravelling many newspapers could not devote personnel and time to the work needed, she added.

Ms Prone was speaking on the second day of the summer school at Avondale House, Rathdrum, Co Wicklow, on a discussion about Irish media and scandal.

The real problem with scandal for the media is if someone does not feed it or give it voice it will be treated in a way that slides off people’s mind, Ms Prone said.

The controversy surrounding Senator Ivor Callely’s expenses would die if the media was not able to give it some life, she said.

Ms Prone said she was amazed how often people issued a conditional apology after a scandal broke, such as: “I may have done something wrong that may have offended someone.” People needed to make a full straightforward apology and a full confession, she said.

The media had not just a right but a duty to make things awkward for politicians, especially those in government, according to David Gordon, political editor of the Belfast Telegraph.

In the North journalists were sometimes told to hold back on a story in case they might do damage to the delicate administration, he said. While this was not a point to ignore, you couldn’t make exceptions, he said.

If the doomsayers were correct about the demise of newspapers then society would miss journalism when it was gone, he said.

Already in an attempt to gain readers there was a danger of newspapers becoming hysterical and damaging good journalism. If things are overhyped and everything is a scandal, then nothing is a scandal, he added.

Journalists should not become preachers, Patsy McGarry, religious affairs correspondent of The Irish Times, said. Journalists should ask questions not supply the answers, he said.

The impact of tribunals of recent decades on corruption in Ireland was also discussed.

Ms Prone said tribunals handed newspapers space-absorbing evidence every day and they were too costly.

Dr Elaine Byrne, The Irish Timescolumnist and adjutant lecturer on Irish politics in Trinity College Dublin, said she was concerned about public fatigue on tribunals which were commonly charged as being too expensive.

However a cost benefit analysis of the tribunals, which she conducted, revealed that on a financial basis tribunals were beneficial. The cost of tribunals would be about €1 billion but the financial benefit, from inquiries such as the Ansbacher and Dirt, was about €2.1 billion, she said.

Byrne also revealed a possible 100-year-old scandal. She said that Charles Stewart Parnell had taken a bribe of £10,000 to amend the Home Rule Act.

Parnell had been offered the modern-day equivalent of €1 million by businessman Cecil Rhodes to amend the Bill so that Irish politicians would be represented in Westminster as well as the Irish parliament.

She discovered this through reading a series of handwritten private letters between Parnell and Rhodes which differed from their public letters. Parnell needed the money to fund unpaid MPs of the Irish Parliamentary Party as well as their election campaigns and Byrne said she was reluctant to describe what Parnell had done as “corruption”.