MONDAY NEWS IN IRELAND often starts with the headlines on Sunday and several very newsy stories broke in the Irish Sunday broadsheets at the end of November that promise to run through Christmas.
Two big items should reverberate all the way into 2012. The first concerns the train wreck of the Irish economy. David Drumm, past head of the Anglo Irish Bank, gave a lengthy interview to Niall O'Dowd and the main thrust of that interview ran across several pages in the Sunday Business Post. If Drumm has any credence, the mandarins in the Irish Ministry of Finance were well out of their depth during the running of the over-heated Celtic Tiger era. The second main story that will affect Irish society concerns the serious libel unleashed by Prime Time Investigates on Father Sean Reynolds, an Irish priest. On the front page of the Sunday Times, Colin Coyle quickly dismantles the investigative work of RTE Presenter Aoife Kavanagh as it tries to decipher why an inflammatory piece was broadcast apparently without any independent fact-checking behind the scenes. In fairness, the investigation is still running but from the simplistic viewing of broadsheet coverage, it appears that the Irish national broadcaster does not have critical safeguards in place to independently cross-check the veracity of substantial reports. It would come as no surprise to learn that old head fact checkers no longer roam the halls at Montrose because they would have been easy targets during repeated culls of staff. I hope the institution of investigative reporting is not mortally wounded on the heels of this sorry mess.
I cover several issues related to current events, technology and small business in the video clip below the break.
Watch on http://youtu.be/I8DE37RXhio
Colin Coyle -- "RTE claim teacher backed priest story" on the front page of The Sunday Times, November 27, 2011.
