Magdagate: Another Mortal Wound for Irish Journalism

You can’t have a democracy without a free press. The biggest danger to Irish sovereignty isn’t the bailout; it’s the absence of a free and functioning press.

Why do you need a free press? You need a free press to hold the powerful to account. To tell people what their leaders are doing and saying on their behalf, to interpret it, to encourage discussion and to ensure that, when the people go to the polls, they are as informed as they can possibly be.

The Irish media are failing badly in this regard. Because the country is so small, it’s always been difficult to have a fully impartial media. Unfortunately, the past year has seen such a calamitous fall in standards that it is now at a stage where the main check to governance of the country is hors de combat, and that is a crisis in any democracy.

RTÉ let itself down on the double. Firstly, the extraordinary libel of Father Kevin Reynolds on Prime Time, and secondly, the scuppering of the Seán Gallagher Presidential campaign by a tweet that was sent from a clearly bogus account. Either is a scandal. The combination of both is mind-boggling as regards standards in a publicly funded national broadcaster.

Today FM disgraced itself in its treatment of Sam Smyth. God only knows what goes on editorially in Newstalk, other than to remark if Prime Time wanted to do a States of Fear II, Marconi House would be a good place to set it. Allegedly.

The Irish Times let itself down very badly indeed in its attempt to re-write history in the sad case of the death of Kate Fitzgerald. They probably know it and the libel laws don’t help, but it doesn’t make it right. It doesn’t make it right at all.

But even in the light of all this, there is something about the “Magda” story in yesterday’s Irish Independent that is particularly worrying. These are the facts: the Indo found an interview in a Polish magazine with a Polish woman who spoke about life in Ireland. The Indo printed the story as the woman having a big laugh at the dumb Paddies who are paying her way.

It would be the perfect newspaper story, if it weren’t for one pesky detail. It’s sensational, it’s got water-cooler appeal, and it rings a bell for people. There’s a whole generation of people who came home from J1s laughing at the Yanks and telling stories of the scams they pulled so it was only reasonable to assume that the new Irish were telling the same stories. And now here was proof.

The one pesky detail is that the story in the Indo bears no relation to the original Polish story. This is the Indo story; this is the Polish original, translated into English by the John Murray show on RTÉ Radio One. There is no basis for the Indo story in the Polish original. None at all. It’s all rubbish. Every word.

So how did it get printed? One of two ways. Either the Independent’s editorial process is so incredibly bad that they really don’t care whether or what they print has any basis in reality at all. The second possibility is worse. The second possibility is that they knew full well what was in the Polish original, and didn’t care.

If the article isn’t true, so what? Nobody’s named, therefore nobody’s libeled, therefore nobody can sue. It’s win-win. Sure they’ll be some yap about it but it’ll sell papers and the Indo will get a reputation as the paper that prints what others are too scared or – hah! – too “politically correct” to share with the nation.

The media is failing to self-regulate. No-one in the media will take on a powerful media group because who knows when the day will come when that somebody may need a new job and hope for food from a hand that they’ve bitten.

So journalists end up in the position of men in the women and children’s lifeboats – they feel terrible about the destruction of their profession, but they prefer it to drowning, thanks all the same.

That’s not good enough. Irish sovereignty is in greater danger from the absence of a free press than from the Troika, who only want their money back. Don’t let media cynicism take your freedom away. Don’t let it!

Television and the Heart of the GAA

Martin Breheny wrote a remarkable article in yesterday’s Irish Independent about the coverage of Gaelic Games on television, specifically TG4. So remarkable, in fact, that your faithful correspondent started to wonder if Martin understood the GAA at all.

Martin started out with an old-fashioned swipe at binnbhriathra na Gaeilge, sean-teanga na nGael. “Since the majority of viewers have only a sketchy knowledge of the Irish language,” sniffs Martin, “they can't enjoy the coverage as much as if the commentaries were in English.”

Would it be wrong of An Spailpín Fánach to point out that a commentary in Mongolian would make it easier to enjoy the coverage compared to some of the stuff that’s come out of my television since poor Micheál Ó hEithir got sick, God be good to him?

Matters of personal taste aside, where Breheny’s argument falls down is in a matter of fact. Breheny compares the GAA TV product to the rugby and soccer products, but the comparison is not legitimate. He is not comparing like with like.

It’s like meeting your neighbour taking his dog for a walk and asking him why he doesn’t take the goldfish for a walk as well. Sure isn’t a goldfish just the same as a dog, really?

The advantage soccer and rugby have over inter-county Gaelic games is that soccer and rugby are professional games. They exist solely to entertain the public. Their schedules are set in such ways as to provide maximum reliable entertainment for the public – everything is honed to that end.

The GAA is not set up to provide entertainment in the same way. It annually provides the greatest sporting spectacle in the country, year after year, in the football and hurling championships, but this is co-incidental, rather than essential, to the GAA’s actual purpose.

If the provision of a sporting entertainment to compare with soccer or rugby were the GAA’s mission, there would have to be some changes made. The league and Championship would be amalgamated. A transfer market would have to be created, in order to ensure that every team had a chance to have good players, and not leave things to chance accidents of birth.

Pride in the jersey, be it ever so humble, counts for lilttle when the mob paid their dollars, are waiting to be entertained at the circus and it’s five minutes to showtime.

After a few years, the GAA would have changed completely. Some counties would have disappeared off the map entirely. It’d be like Aussie Rules without the money, or the League of Ireland with crowds. Or the current GAA without its soul. A Frankenstein’s monster wandering the Earth, wondering why it’s different.

Because providing a reliable sporting entertainment isn’t the GAA’s mission. If the GAA ever changes from that it will have ceased to be what it is, which is the single greatest common cause in our society.

All over the country, in the recession-hit and broken-hearted and bitter and divided Ireland of 2011, people give up their free evenings in front of the fire to take busloads of dirty, noisy kids back mountains and into glens to play busloads of other dirty, noisy kids in games referred by fat men with red faces with good hearts that mightn’t really be fit for running around any more. And they all do it for a chicken dinner at Christmas and an empty promise of an All-Ireland ticket if the county team goes on a run.

Of course, volunteers train kids to play soccer and rugby too. But it’s not the same. The connection isn’t as strong. One in a thousand soccer stars might get an apprenticeship with Dagenham United. The good rugby players will find out how hard it is to get a paying gig in a country with two and three-quarter professional teams.

But the GAA star still meets you at funerals and stands next to you in the queue at the Centra and has Ruby Walsh’s horse and high hopes in the Grand National sweep in the local.

People talk about the heart of the GAA being a full house in a floodlit Croke Park. It’s not. It’s a gang of kids and a fat man on the side of a mountain, and the kids beginning to realise that they’re from somewhere, not anywhere, and that matters. Long may it thrive.