Letter to the Editor: Readers can make their own minds up

I want to thank Michael Clifford for his caustic, abusive and deeply personalised review of my new book Frenzy and Betrayal. In a single article he starkly illustrated an important issue my book addresses which undermines trust in Irish journalism — the incapacity of some journalists to reassess false narratives in which they are heavily invested and the tendency to contemptuously reject any challenge to such narratives.

Michael Clifford was an enthusiastic advocate of false stories that GSOC was under surveillance by the gardaí, that as minister for justice i was involved in covering up gardaí failures and that I ignored Sergeant Maurice McCabe’s concerns. He was wrong.