Comment: Details matter, Mr Duffy, especially when you are pitching for the top job

Details matter.

When your stock and trade is communications and you can charge €450 an hour, details are very important.

When you are putting yourself up to contest the office of President of Ireland, they matter even more.

When you are said candidate and you are addressing the media at the formal launch of your campaign, they matter a lot.

Especially when you are addressing questions as to why you want to be President.

Yesterday, having arrived 17 minutes late, Gavin Duffy — he of Dragon’s Den fame — made an unforgivable error.

Toward the end of his lengthy and sometimes testy press conference, Duffy was asked about why he wanted to be President.

He spoke of being ambitious for Ireland and wanting to make it a better country than it was when he grew up.

Presidential candidate Gavin Duffy has told his campaign launch the country would be best served if the next president is familiar with trade and tariff issues given the importance of Brexit pic.twitter.com/zJHKc6aDE6

— RTÉ News (@rtenews) October 2, 2018

“If you were born in 1960 as I was, and you lived through the 1980s, you just have to cast back to all the stuff that happened in the 1980s, the Kerry babies, Joanne Lovett, etc, and all of those issues and you see where Ireland is at now,” he said.

Ann Rose Lovett, and not Joanne Lovett, as he said, was the 15-year-old schoolgirl who died giving birth to a stillborn baby boy beside a grotto of the Virgin Mary at a church in Granard, Co Longford, on January 31, 1984.

Her case and the tragic circumstances have stained this country and highlighted its at times disgraceful attitude toward women.

Duffy, perhaps, in error, said Joanne in reference to Joanne Hayes, who became a central figure in the Kerry Babies controversy.

Now, an understandable error, maybe, but a critical one. Particularly when Duffy himself only raised those two tragedies.

But, it did raise the question as to his grasp of detail.

Another detail he was not willing to go into was the advice he gave businessman Denis O’Brien when he was working with him on his response to the 2011 Moriarty Tribunal, which was savage in its criticism of Mr O’Brien.

Duffy said he had done 40 hours of work for O’Brien in 20 years and had billed him for a total of €18,000.

When pressed repeatedly, he refused to disclose the nature of the advice, citing grounds of confidentiality.

Another detail he has had to clarify was how much he would spend on his campaign and how he would fund it.

Back during the summer, he stated first that he had secured a loan on his family home for the amount of €750,000.

Then it emerged that the loan, which was coming from a business bank, was not in fact a loan on the family home but on other properties on his land which are related to his businesses.

Yesterday, he then said that he now intends to spend €300,000 on his campaign and this, he said, is coming not from a loan but from his savings.

He proclaimed with pride that he, over a long career, has had no issue with tax, with bad debts, or with any legal action.

“I am saying here you will not find anything in my track record,” he said.

“I know in my business there never has been a tax issue, a bad debt issue, I have never been involved in litigation.”

“It’s not to say there have not been difficulties, I just don’t see litigation as a [route to take].”