Cullen: Colleagues avoided me during controversy
“When you’re under the gun, so to speak, of an assault where you know that it is an untruth, you’re on your own,” he said.
The Arts, Sport and Tourism Minister was discussing the unfounded allegations that he had an affair with communications consultant Ms Leech, allegations which made their way into certain media coverage in 2004.
“Your colleagues tend to not want to be tainted. They worry, is there some truth in this, so they run in one direction,” he said.
“Some other colleagues are anxious to be promoted. They’ll go in another direction: ‘If you’re taken out, great, maybe I’ll have an opportunity.’
“Your friends become very uncertain because of the way certain things are presented. And you’re left with maybe one or two people that you hope that will come to the rescue.”
Mr Cullen said that in his case, the two people who showed “the greatest humanity” to him were Mary Harney and Bertie Ahern.
He said there was a political rule of thumb that said if you were “hit” by the Sunday papers for three weekends in a row, your career had no chance of survival.
“Just as a matter of interest, I spent 13 weeks in a row on the front pages of the Sunday newspapers – all about a lie,” he said.
“And the despair that you find yourself in is incredible. It is absolutely indescribable. You want to run screaming down Kildare Street shouting, ‘I’m innocent, I’m innocent.’”
Mr Cullen described how his parents, his former wife, his children and members of his wider family had been “followed” by journalists when the coverage was at its height.
He said a negative page had been set up about him on social networking site Bebo that had received over one million hits.
Mr Cullen was speaking at a seminar in Dublin on the recently introduced Defamation Act, organised by Hayes solicitors.
The act offers new safeguards to both the public and the media, but Mr Cullen said that in his view, it “gave more to the media than it did to the individual”.
It was his belief that privacy legislation should be introduced to safeguard individuals’ rights.
“I don’t like a lot of the things that are written, and I’m firmly in favour of the privacy bill – firmly in favour – and if I could in my time in politics see a privacy bill brought in, I would do so.”
Communications consultant Ms Leech was awarded more than €1.8 million after a High Court jury found a series of Evening Herald articles about her implied that she had been having an affair with the minister.
Independent Newspapers, the group which owns the Herald, is appealing the damages award to the Supreme Court.
Separately, she secured damages and an apology in settlement of a High Court libel action against Associated Newspapers, publishers of the Irish Mail on Sunday and the Daily Mail.
Ms Leech also secured an apology and damages from RTÉ because of comments made by a caller to the Liveline radio programme.
