Mick Clifford: Ivan Yates will brush off his latest controversy, while media trust falls again
Ivan Yates was recently uncovered as having provided media training to presidential candidate Jim Gavin while simultaneously commenting on the election on podcasts and on radio. File photo: Sam Boal/RollingNews.ie
Ivan Yates is unlikely to be experiencing any “trauma” over what has befallen him in the public square this week.
The former government minister, bookmaker and media entrepreneur was uncovered as having provided media training to presidential candidate Jim Gavin while simultaneously commenting on the election on podcasts and on radio.
Such a conflict of interest would have a major impact on the reputation of, for instance, a journalist. But Yates, despite engaging for over 15 years in journalism in its broadest form, has always claimed he is not a member of the press.
People who know him suggest that the whole affair will be “like water off a duck’s back, unless there is any comeback on his corporate dollar”.
That dollar comes mainly in the form of presenting and hosting commercial gatherings, principally to do with the construction industry. So he won’t have any sleepless night unless he’s getting calls telling him he is now considered unclean in the corporate world.
There is little fear of that.
The kind of knowledge he has, his cachet, his easy style, will ensure that he is still in demand. So while the media from which he earned a tidy income for the last 15 years is up in a heap over it, Yates will just keep on keepin’ on, focused on the next challenge.
Another reason he may not be too perturbed at having a harsh light shone on his tall and imposing frame is that he has previously suffered real trauma through work, not once but twice.
The first occasion was in 1996 when he was serving as minister for agriculture in what was termed the rainbow coalition government. He was 37 at that time. He was first elected to the Dáil at 22 and pretty quickly was spotted as having talent and potential.
He also backed the winning horse for the leadership so when John Bruton got into power he handed Yates a senior ministry. His time in office coincided with an outbreak of BSE, known as mad cow disease. The minister, understandably was under severe pressure.
“I wasn't eating properly, drinking a gallon of coffee every morning in lieu of breakfast, followed by sandwiches at my desk. I stayed in the Mount Herbert Hotel (now the Sandymount Hotel), instead of having my own apartment,” he wrote in his memoir, .
“All my life I had successfully solved problems by applying energy, analysis and focus to them. I was totally up for the challenges of being a Cabinet minister and was determined to make a success of it, but something outside my control was happening.”
He was having a nervous breakdown. A combination of prescription drugs and therapy saw him through and he recovered. All of this was only revealed in full years later in his very frank memoir.
At the time, both while in government and subsequently between 1997 and 2002 on the opposition benches, he was widely tipped as a potential leader of Fine Gael.
Then, to much surprise, he announced ahead of the 2002 general election that he was leaving politics. He wanted instead to concentrate on what was a burgeoning business empire.
In 1987, just six years into his parliamentary career he had opened a bookies shop in Tramore, Co Waterford. This was effectively a business on the side. He also had a busy homelife. He married his wife Deirdre, a school teacher, while still in his 20s and the couple had four children.
He was doing well for himself. By the time he retired from politics he had 10 shops. In the early straits of the Celtic Tiger era, he saw the potential to scale further peaks of success.
Over the following years he expanded the portfolio six-fold to a point where he owned 63 shops, including two in the UK, and employed 300 staff on a turnover of €200m. As with plenty of other self-styled entrepreneurs he thought that he was now living in the land of the forever sun.
When the world economy started to rain, and the worst of it washed up on these shores, he joined the ranks of the overstretched. His business went to the wall, leaving huge bank debts.
Enter the third stage of the talented Mr Yates. In 2010, he found himself filling in as a Newstalk radio presenter for George Hook, a fellow alpha male who considered himself a bulwark against “political correctness gone mad”.
Yates was a natural in the presenter’s chair, particularly in Newstalk where his schtick had more scope. But the past wouldn’t leave him alone.
In 2012, he concluded his best option would be to declare bankruptcy in the UK, where he would be able to emerge from the process in little over a year, while it could take more than a decade in this country.
He packed in his Newstalk gig and decamped to Wales. It was not a pleasant experience. Later, he would recall that he was bereft through that year, separated from his family. For an ebullient man his exile saw him also burdened with his own company as he was a stranger in a strange land, who knew nobody.
He returned with tales of loneliness, softened by daily drinking. “It does seem like the whole State is against you,” he said of attempting to clear his debts. “The State owns the banks, the State controls the insolvency law…you just have to suck it up.”
Like many in the upper echelons of a battered society in the wake of the crash, his comeback was rapid and fiscally bountiful. He did a deal with the banks, his stock rose in the media world and his ebullient presence was in demand on the commercial circuit.
In 2017, he was appointed co-host of Virgin Media’s , along with Matt Cooper.
People who worked with him across the broadcast media suggest he wasn’t the most “collegiate” of colleagues.
“Management loved him,” one source in Newstalk remembers. “He got the ratings and he more than filled a gap left by Hook.”
After five years he quit both TV and radio gigs to concentrate on the corporate world. He continued to do fill-in stints for regular presenters and two years ago he and Cooper began the podcast.
Meanwhile, he was frequently called on as a pundit for elections. Unlike many of his fellow pundits, he was always on hand to offer a prediction, a hazardous business, particularly these days in a fractured political environment.
It was on another podcast, with Newstalk political correspondent Sean Dafoe, that he generated huge controversy after Gavin departed the election contest. Yates said if he was asked his opinion by Fine Gael how to campaign he suggested they should “smear the bejaysus” out of Catherine Connolly.
The comment was seized on by Connolly’s campaign and severely discommoded his old Fine Gael colleagues. During the controversy, current minister for health Jennifer Carroll McNeill offered a scathing assessment of Yates’ punditry.
“I don’t really listen to Ivan Yates,” she said.
“Or did I stop listening to him when he predicted that Sinn Féin were going to take 70 sets in the last election? Or is it his gloriously inconsistent, patchy political analysis? I can’t remember when I stopped listening to him.”
Last Saturday, the revealed his involvement in the Gavin campaign. Cooper, understandably upset and angry that he had been kept in the dark by his co-host, immediately moved to sever Yates's involvement with the podcast. Surprisingly, Yates has been largely silent all week.
He is unlikely to be back on the airwaves, certainly in the short term. While he has always disassociated himself from the journalism trade, listeners and viewers are unlikely to take much notice of that nuance.
What the whole affair has arguably done is dealt a blow to the credibility of the media. In recent years, as the old economic model for newspapers in particular, has increased employment insecurity, a growing number of journalists have quit to join political parties in one role or another.
This has given rise to cynicism about how independent the media might be if its practitioners can seamlessly transfer from gamekeeper to poacher.
For the greater part, however, once gone over to the dark side, journalists are highly unlikely to return to the fourth estate. Yates, by contrast, made a career of straddling between the two, interrogating politicians on air, while training them on how to conduct themselves while being interviewed.
It’s highly unlikely Ivan will lose any sleep over the impact the whole affair might have on trust in the media. He has previously shown a capacity to pick himself up, brush himself down and carry on.
At 66, he shows no interest in slowing up. If he does pine for an audience outside conference halls again, it will be interesting to observe where he may show up and how he will be received.
These days, there is certainly a cohort out there who will tune in for opinions and dismiss this week’s furore as an example of that much used and abused term, “wokeness”.
You Tube, for instance, is top heavy with former mainstream presenters who carve out a corner of cyberspace where issues like balance and conflict of interest are given short shrift. Don’t be too surprised if he turns up on that platform in some guise.
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