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Brendan Ogle is the spokesperson for Right2Water, and is Unite the Union’s Senior Officer in the Republic of Ireland.
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In the last podcast I had an interview with presidential candidate Gemma O’Doherty, and I have to say that I found the reactions to it pretty depressing. There was a twitterstorm in a teacup with a series of journalists making what I thought were incredibly petty complaints. In particular they complained of Gemma doing an undercover story several years ago that exposed some crisis pregnancy agencies advising clients on how to obtain and smuggle into Ireland abortion pills – which were illegal at the time – into the state.
Now, whatever you think of abortion, it’s pretty remarkable that a crisis pregnancy agency would advise someone to break the law, and reporting on that is absolutely a journalistic thing to do. Kitty Holland of the Irish Times in particular laid at Gemma O’Doherty’s door a tasteless joke on Twitter shared by someone who apparently supports Gemma.
Now, I can see that if Gemma O’Doherty had shared a tasteless joke, then she might be justifiably criticised, but criticising her for a bad joke from a supporter of hers, that’s just nonsense, and it exposes an agenda on the part of Kitty Holland. If Kitty Holland is so short of stories to report, she might do better to cover something like the garda commissioner being called as a witness in a case that centred on him personally benefiting from garda corruption – that was a story that made international headlines, but not a single word was printed about it in the Irish Times.
All that said, I don’t think that Gemma O’Doherty – or anyone else – is above criticism. I had a long discussion with Gemma O’Doherty after the recording, and she was not happy that I had asked her about instances of fake news that she had shared, including sharing stories fabricated by the Internet Research Agency, an arm of Russian Military Intelligence, the same bunch that were stoking dissent through Facebook during the 2016 election in the US, and ever since.
At the time that I recorded the interview, I hadn’t seen some other things that Gemma had promoted online, and I want to look at two in particular. The first is a graphic that she shared widely in the context of a story about a chemical that is claimed to be a carcinogen, that causes cancer.
The image puts Ireland among the countries with the highest cancer rates in the world, along with other rich western countries, and lists countries like Niger, Gambia, Bhutan and Yemen as countries with the lowest cancer rates.
The intent is clearly to promote the idea that the industrialised west is bad for your health. And this is absolute nonsense. Cancer is a disease of old age. The reason that Ireland, Denmark, Australia and Norway have among the highest cancer rates in the world is because we have the highest life expectancies in the world. People in Niger, Gambia, Bhutan and Yemen don’t get cancer because they are dead of other causes before they are old enough to die of cancer, and to think otherwise is daft tinfoil-hat conspiratorial nonsense.
Also, on other media Gemma has defended her coverage and sharing of stories on the HPV vaccine Gardasil. She’s said that she is just asking questions, but that’s not quite true. It’s clear from the direction of her apologia that she supports some antivaxxers, and at least sometimes she reports outrageous and false antivaxxer claims as fact. That’s not ‘just asking questions’.
Given the constitutional restrictions on the office, we have a lot of presidential wannabees, a lot of presidential wannabees who are talking about how they would use the office in creative ways. That’s not a bad thing. Mary Robinson was slapped down for making a similar claim, and she proved the critics wrong.
But if you’re going to do that, remember that judgement is key. It’s true, that who the president is photographed with, who they host at the Áras, that has an impact. And Gemma O’Doherty and other candidates have put that on the agenda. Now that it’s out there, nobody can complain that the judgement of the candidate in who or what they might endorse is central to the election of a president. And that means that a candidate’s record of good or bad judgement in the past is fair game to discuss.
