Madam, - "I'm with the old-style mogul," Eamon Dunphy tells us in his piece about the "power struggle" in Independent News and Media ( Weekend Review, April 12th). Well, I'm not sure who I'm with, but I do know I'm not with Eamon Dunphy. In fact, I've rarely read such self-serving twaddle on any aspect of the Irish media.
Before making a few points, I should say that I have worked for both O'Reilly and O'Brien. I was news editor of the Irish Independentfor 16 years and I am currently working as the editor of The Right Hook programme on Newstalk. I have never met O'Brien and I once shook hands with O'Reilly on a "papal" visit to the Indo newsroom about ten years ago (if there had been any more genuflecting I would have felt we were doing the Stations of the Cross).
Dunphy claims the support for his Sunday Independentattacks on John Hume, Seamus Heaney, Mary Robinson and others was expressive of Tony O'Reilly's interest in freedom of the press. I have news for him. It was expressive of an interest in circulation. The attacks he refers to were used for their shock value and Dunphy was employed as a loose cannon, as someone who was likely to attach his name to something unpredictable, no matter how irrational it might have been. To compare those articles, by inference or otherwise, to Woodward and Bernstein - and Tony O'Reilly to Ben Bradlee - is as bonkers as some of the stuff he wrote for the Independent.
"A working class lad of no particular distinction, a former Millwall footballer to boot, the Sunday Independentallowed my voice to be heard." You see what I mean: they certainly weren't employing him for the quality of his writing unless someone on the "Sindo" features desk had a special appreciation of Ireland's Ownprose. He was being exploited for his brute-force style and when Tony O'Reilly was defending his right of expression he was, I suspect, more interested in his value as a circulation-getter than as a journalist. Dunphy contends that the argument between O'Reilly and O'Brien is too important to be left on the finance pages of our newspapers and then undermines your case by presenting it in a naive good guy/bad guy manner.
Maybe he does believe he is Carl Bernstein. In his lengthy article he gave us Dunphy's greatest hits (the sacred cows of "Official Ireland" he had assailed in the Sindo); he told us how he had saved T he Last Wordprogramme on Today FM; and, of course, he claimed that he abandoned his well-paid job in Newstalkon a point of principle. The station wanted to increase the cost of listeners' text messages and Eamon wasn't having it.
Eamon Dunphy left Newstalkbecause that's what Eamon Dunphy does. He never stays anywhere very long - RTÉ, Today FM, the Sunday Independent, Newstalk. And, of course his need for self-aggrandisement means that he can't just turn off the laptop and go - he has to be doing the world a favour.
After just 10 months in NewstalkI'm not going to comment on Denis O'Brien or his intentions but I think I should inform Eamon that those "gifted and committed young journalists" haven't gone away. I work with some of them every day. - Yours, etc,
PHILIP MOLLOY, Spencer Villas, Glenageary, Co Dublin.