Communications vacuum gave Lowry and O’Brien free rein on Moriarty

YOU spend 14 years of your life on one task.

You devote millions of euro of taxpayers’ money to it. You survive a couple of mistakes and a rake of legal challenges. You publish a report which states, without equivocation, that a Government minister received loads of money from the person to whom his department then awarded a mind-bogglingly lucrative licence.

And then you watch while three of the men you excoriated take over the airwaves to tell the public that you got it arseways. They suggest you got it arseways because you started with a thesis for which you then sought the supportive data. You were basically out to get them, and you let nothing stand in your way. But — they point out — your 14-year report amounts to nothing more than one man’s opinion and you know what you can do with your opinion.

After the feeding frenzy generated by the three blokes at whom you pointed your flamethrower, one Sunday newspaper says the overwhelming majority of the people of Ireland who paid for your work believe you did a good job and found the truth. But a significant minority, particularly of the commentariat, do not go along with that consensus.

The significant minority agree with the three blamed blokes. They accept that shed loads of money were freighted around and that Michael Lowry shouldn’t have been the receiving depot for that money. They gloss over Michael Lowry having offshore accounts. They agree that a lot of stuff was going on that shouldn’t have been going on. But ultimately, they don’t buy the Moriarty Report.

Now, some of them work for media owned by Denis O’Brien, and so you might raise an eyebrow about their capacity to search out and extirpate any personal bias they might possibly have, consequent upon their personal goals (like continuing to feed their family) and the possibility that fisting the air and yelling “Yay for Moriarty” might make those goals less easily achievable.

But that context was clear before the Moriarty Report was published. And that, in turn, leads us to the manner of its publication and why its publication was so badly managed, in communication terms.

Here’s the proposition. You have a report that has absorbed perhaps a quarter of your working life. It bears your name and will go down in history because of its scope and scale. We must, therefore, assume you want to position it properly in public consciousness. If you do, then you need to prevent any possibility of it being subverted. So you must ask yourself a basic question: “What’s the key challenge to the Moriarty Report being universally understood and accepted?”

The answer is obvious. The key challenge lies in the fact that the national experts on your plan, before it’s ever published, are Denis O’Brien and Michael Lowry. They were there from the beginning, from the “Once Upon a Time” moment. And they were involved right up to the “They all lived happily ever after” moment. Their memories have been constantly refreshed by having to give evidence and produce documentation from the time at your demand. They have been tracking your every move, remember, for a decade and a half.

Now you know the extent of the challenge: If you simply present 2,000 pages of data out of the blue, who are going to become the most authoritative commentators on it? Right. The guys you’ve skewered in it.

Neither of them can afford to accept any smidgeon of your report, because it would unravel — in Denis O’Brien’s case — the foundation of his business empire as well as his personal reputation, and — in the case of the former minister — invite visits to Michael Lowry from the Garda Síochána. So it’s pretty predictable that if they get first go at publicly interpreting the report, they’re going to forcefully suggest it’s garbage from start to finish. This will be enthusiastically if less expertly supported by Ben Dunne and a newspaper columnist who once worked for you. O’Brien and Lowry are going to get as much access, locally and nationally, as they could possibly want, when the report is published, because they’ll necessarily be mad as hell, and media loves anybody who’s mad as hell.

All of that was obvious, yet the decision was made to let it out, unheralded, in a communication roughly equivalent to making an announcement into a force 10 gale.

Of course, there was never a possibility that Justice Moriarty would go on radio and television to explain his findings. Judges don’t do that. But the communications imperative was to ensure that someone authoritative and steeped in the detail could go on radio and TV in the hours immediately following its publication, to take the initiative in establishing how people would understand the report. Instead, primacy was ceded to O’Brien and Lowry. And because primacy was ceded, the two of them set the agenda.

One example of that agenda-setting was the matter of the pub conversation. Within hours of its publication, the 2,000-plus pages of the report were being dismissed using the pub conversation as indicative of the complete lack of evidence manifest by Moriarty. He had — the argument went — managed to decide what two people had said to each other when neither he nor anybody else was present and when both participants in the conversation denied it covered what he said it covered. Extrapolating from this apparently clear example of simple craziness, Denis and Michael promoted the view that the entire kit and caboodle was one sustained costly libel on the two of them.

Now, if the first interpreters had been briefed by or were representative of the Moriarty team, they would have established, early and often, five points about that pub meeting. Firstly, that the two claimed it was an accident, yet it was in O’Brien’s diary. Secondly, any minister whose department is at a critical stage in the biggest tender process in the history of the State who meets one of the contenders by accident in a pub should nod and move on, not engage in one-to-one chat. Thirdly, having started in one pub, the meeting moved to another, less crowded drinking place, which wouldn’t make sense unless the two wanted to exchange confidential information. Fourthly, a third party, in evidence that ran counter to his own interests, told Moriarty that O’Brien had — after the meeting — told him what had happened at it. Fifthly, the O’Brien consortium promptly took action which would have been required by the information the third party claimed had passed hands in the pub.

But, of course, Justice Moriarty would never have considered it proper to brief potential spokespeople for the report. Indeed, if last night’s RTÉ news report suggesting that he found his phone was being tapped in the last fortnight is accurate, then influencing media reception of his report may have been the least of Justice Moriarty’s worries. If someone was tapping tribunal phones this late in the game, the assumption has to be that it was to ascertain the publication date to pre-empt it with an injunction to stop publication.

At least that didn’t happen...