Post-truth society needs to know difference between fact and gossip

Once gossip takes the place of factual news you are marking time until your democracy collapses, writes Victoria White.

"I’VE BEEN reading about you in a book,” television presenter Vincent Browne said to me in the TV3 studio. Had someone written a laudatory obituary about me before the fact, I wondered hopefully?

Eh, no. Browne had been reading Hell at the Gates: The Inside Story of Ireland’s Financial Downfall by John Lee and Irish Examiner political correspondent, Daniel McConnell. It contains excerpts from a 2009 Sunday Express story which says I was at a dinner party where I announced that my husband, then-Minister Eamon Ryan, said, among other wackier things, that the country “was on the brink of bankruptcy” and would soon “not be able to pay for social welfare or pensions”.