Royston’s ‘lie’ went round the world, before the truth in it got its boots on

I’VE met Royston Brady only once, briefly, before he became the poster-boy for failure. And I feel guilty as hell towards him.

Not because I did anything bad towards him during the election. I didn't. I quite enjoyed the way his refusal to go on current affairs programmes maddened the interviewers on those programmes. He offered them a new menu. Instead of getting ratty with politicians who refuse to respond to their questions, they could get ratty with a politician who refused to respond to their invitations. And ratty they really got.

It could be suggested, of course, that instead of getting personally outraged over one cheeky chappie refusing to extend his head for their chopper, it would suit media interrogators better to expose Gerry Adams' mesmerizing drone of meaningless phrases for what it is and stop him and his younger female clones from serving it up on every media occasion.

Maybe, having dispatched Royston to obscurity, they'll get around to that. In the meantime, though, portraying the pursuit of Dublin's Lord Mayor as fearless service of the public and relentless cleaving to the truth demonstrates how impoverished our understanding of current affairs has become. It's roughly equivalent to portraying Winnie the Pooh as a flasher. Winnie the Pooh is trouser-free. True. He'll wear his red t-shirt and nothing else, and always looks a tad unfinished to me. But does disrespecting the rest of us with his furry little bottom really matter? And was Royston's refusal to play the media game of any more moment than Winnie's missing underpants? I feel guilty towards Royston Brady because, when the story surfaced about his father, the taxi and the Dublin/Monaghan bombings, I thought "wot a plonker". Crass and crazy, I thought, to advance such a load of unsupportable drivel and draw the victims of that bombing, plus the gardaí who investigated it, plus the Barron Commission, plus an evening newspaper of enormous relevance to his potential voters, down upon himself.

In the final days running into the election, a phantom community of reasonable people formed around this view of Royston, whose political hopes were submerged by a tsunami of self-righteous condemnation.

The episode exemplifies the old axiom that a lie can be halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on.

The man who eventually got the boots onto the truth in this instance was a researcher on RTE's 5/7 Live. He went back to the Irish Times of the day of the bombings and found on its front page the story of two taxi men abducted at gunpoint the previous night, taken to the Dublin mountains, and left there, minus their cars, to find their own way home. One of those drivers was named Edward Brady. His address was given in the story. It was the address where Royston Brady's family lived at the time.

In other words, Brady's father WAS abducted at gunpoint. As Royston claimed. More to the point, the abduction happened the night before bombings which were unique in the modern history of Ireland, south of the Border. Therefore, Brady's inference that the taxis were used for the getaway of the bombers was impeccably logical.

Of course, the cars may not have been so used, but you must admit it's a hell of a coincidence. Taxis are like musak: we get so used to them, we forget they're there. Which would make a taxi a fine vehicle for escape after an atrocity. It would arguably be the most likely vehicle to be waved on by police at checkpoints.

If, as a result, the Brady family believed their father's taxi had been peripherally involved in the bombings, they were not (as at first seemed likely) confecting a connection to something exciting. They were adding two and two together and getting four.

The problem is that it took ten days for one journalist (the 5/7 Live researcher whose name I missed) to get to where media should have started. It was easier for media to activate victims to criticise Brady. (Victims are the media equivalent of ATMs. ATMs give cash on demand. Victims give quotes on demand.) But hold, I hear you say. The Barron Commission wrote to Brady a year ago, when he first said this stuff, asking him to provide them with any further information he had and he never bothered to reply. True. How discourteous and administratively lacking he was, to be sure. His own baffled defence is that he didn't HAVE the further information they wanted, so didn't get back to them. QED.

Nonetheless, the letter from the Barron Commission says more about the Commission than it says about Brady. The Barron Commission, made up of bright people, could work out that Royston Brady was two years of age when the bombings happened, and could, accordingly, know nothing but hearsay attenuated by time.

The Barron Commission would have been better advised to find out that Brady's mother is still alive not a difficult task and ask her. At least her hearsay would have been more authoritative than family legends half-remembered by a man who was a toddler when the events happened.

Alternatively, the Barron Commission could have gone back to the newspapers of the day and instigated an investigation into what happened the garda investigation of the two abductions.

The truth is that the episode was reported to the gardaí. Yet a retired garda appeared on radio programmes last week rubbishing the Brady story, saying he'd never come across any such issue in all his forensic work.

Again, this says more about the gardaí than it says about Royston. If one group of the gardaí, investigating the worst bombings in peacetime Ireland, didn't get told about armed men abducting taxi drivers the night before, then the communication within the force at the time was grievously flawed. If that same group of gardaí didn't spot a story prominently displayed in national newspapers on the day of the atrocity, then they had tunnel vision and may have missed something of pivotal relevance.

Of course, the media interrogators avoided by Royston Brady during the campaign will still feel he got what was coming to him because he wouldn't go on their programmes to articulate his policies.

However, let's hear from Patricia McKenna on this point.

On a post-election programme where everybody commiserated with her on losing her seat, McKenna mildly observed that most of the programmes on which she appeared during the campaign didn't discuss policies at all, but concentrated instead on opinion polls and posters.

Mc Kenna was awash in policies. She went on programmes and lost her seat.

Brady avoided programmes, was accused of having no policies and lost his future.

Or maybe not.

On 5/7 Live, responding to their researcher's discovery of the evidence supporting everything he had said, Royston Brady was lucid, interesting, found time to thank his team and the people who voted for him, and expressed no bitterness against anybody.

It was a good job interview for whatever job he goes for next.