It’s absurd to suggest media jumped the gun on payments to Taoiseach
“They should have delayed it because it was before a tribunal”, he said. “I feel very, very strongly that if the tribunal made the judgement that the Irish Times could then make their judgement and publish the material”.
This particular tribunal was set up in 1997 and at the rate it is going, God only knows when it will conclude. Bertie Ahern received the first of the money in 1993 when he was Minister for Finance, and he hung on to it for over nine years as Taoiseach. It is absurd to suggest that the media jumped the gun or showed disrespect for the tribunal. The argument could just as validly be made that the tribunal has shown disrespect for the media.
The news media and the tribunals have different roles. The question people should be asking is not why the media broke the story when it did, but why it took it so long to get the story in the first place.
The tribunal was set up to look into planning irregularities and payments to politicians, but Judge Alan Mahon has allowed himself to be diverted into investigating how The Irish Times got the story. If the aim of whoever leaked the material was to distract the attention of the tribunal, the ploy has certainly worked.
“The primary concern of the tribunal at present is to protect the integrity of its inquiries,” Judge Mahon stated recently. “This objective is best served by taking all necessary steps to establish the identity of the party or parties who furnished the documentation to The Irish Times”.
Surely the judge does not think he should have the right to delay any aspect of Irish life to facilitate his deliberations. He is supposed to be inquiring into planning corruption and payments to politicians, not the information-gathering techniques of reporters.
From a media perspective, the important issue was whether it was in the public interest to know that the Taoiseach was financially indebted to friends.
Judge Brian McCracken ruled in August 1997 that it was “quite unacceptable that a member of Dáil Éireann, and in particular a cabinet minister and Taoiseach, should be supported in his personal lifestyle by gifts made to him personally.” As Taoiseach, Bertie warmly endorsed those findings.
“Public representatives must not be under a personal financial obligation to anyone”, the Taoiseach told the Dáil. He said the money he received was a loan, but he made no real effort to repay it for well over a decade until after Colm Keena broke the story.
The public may or may not be exercised over this behaviour, but the people have the information now and it is their right to decide to ignore it. The only proper way that they could have come to that decision, however, was by knowing the information. Thus, Colm Keena and his editor, Geraldine Kennedy, should be congratulated, not prosecuted.
Keena could have said he destroyed the document before getting the subpoena but that would have been a lie. His honesty shines against the backdrop of all the perjury that he has undoubtedly witnessed in covering tribunals.
David Barstow, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter with the New York Times, delivered a riveting address at the Cleraun conference about the responsibility of journalists to break news stories. With Keena sitting beside him chairing the session, Barstow stressed the importance of media honesty.
“You need the public to believe that you are actually a force for good in society, that you care about what you do, and if your public is not with you up to that moment”, he said turning to Keena, “then this guy is going to jail and nobody is going to say a word boo”.
Barstow talked movingly about visiting his colleague Judy Miller, who served 85 days in prison last year for refusing to reveal the source of a CIA leak that identified Valerie Plame as a covert CIA operative. Ironically, Miller did not break that story, but she went to jail anyway.
Barstow also alluded to the case of Josh Wolf, 24, who is in jail for refusing to hand over a videotape he filmed at an anti-G8 protest in San Francisco last year. He provided some of his footage to two TV stations, and a California grand jury then subpoenaed his raw footage because some protesters damaged a police car.
ALTHOUGH he had no footage of the incident, he refused to hand over his tape on principle. He could not be prosecuted under state law because California has shield laws protecting journalists from having to reveal unpublished material.
A federal court intervened, however, on the grounds that the San Francisco police receives federal anti-terrorism aide. Damaging police property was therefore deemed a federal offence, which was an abuse of the anti-terrorist legislation.
After a federal judge ordered Wolf to hand over his videotape, he invited the judge to view the material so that he could see there was no pertinent footage, but the judge refused. Wolf is currently in jail where he could spend up to a year unless he hands over the tape unconditionally.
Wolf is comparatively lucky when one thinks of what the federal government had done to Sami al-Haj, a Sudanese cameraman for the Arabic station Al-Jazeera. He has been incarcerated without trial for five years in Guantanamo Bay.
We have aped some of the worst aspects of American society, the binge-drinking youngsters, teenage sex, organised crime and drug culture. We have also imitated some of its judicial activism and its obsession with litigation. Would somebody please explain where’s the justice in the courts rewarding the culpable while society has to pay for the negligence or stupidity of those people.
While Bertie’s political difficulties were dominating the news, AIB announced that none of its staff would be disciplined for stealing over €21 million from customers by overcharging in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This brought the extent of the AIB’s rip-off to €65.5m. People go to jail for shoplifting, but nothing happens to our breed of bank robbers.
There are radical wrongs in our society that need to be exposed, but not with another tribunal, because some of them have been the biggest rip-offs of all. We need a more effective media.
We should not ape the Yanks in demanding the identity of media sources. America, which proudly calls itself the Land of the Free, has dropped to 53rd place in the world rankings on press freedom published this week by the international organisation Reporters Without Borders.
At the top of the scale are four European countries where the organisation found no instances of censorship, violence, intimidation or reprisals against journalists.
Tied for first place are Finland, Holland, Iceland and Ireland. With our record of crazy censorship, epitomised by the banning of our greatest writers, and with the memory of what happened to Veronica Guerin, we can be truly proud of our ranking. Let’s hope that the High Court has the sense to facilitate the media’s need to protect its sources and has the courage to recognise that the attempt to expose those sources was — in this instance — inappropriate because Colm Keena and Geraldine Kennedy were providing a service that democracy requires.
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