A senior Irish Examiner journalist has said the basis for two news articles he wrote about the Irish Planning Institute had been details contained in a confidential report compiled by a major consultancy firm.<\/p>\n
Mick Clifford told a High Court defamation action that he had written the two pieces after hearing \u201con the grapevine\u201d that there were issues within the institute \u2014 the representative body for planners in Ireland \u2014 and after coming into possession of the confidential report, compiled by EY, which had been commissioned to investigate certain matters which had arisen at the IPI.<\/p>\n
He described EY as \u201cone of the top consultants in the country\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThey do all sorts of consultative work in industry, in finance,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The defamation action against the Irish Examiner has been taken by former executive director of the IPI Orla Purcell, who claims that allegations made about her in the EY report were presented as fact in the two published articles and that they damaged her reputation.<\/p>\n
The Irish Examiner has denied the allegations, and claims the articles were published in the public interest and comprised fair and reasonable publication.<\/p>\n
Mr Clifford, who has worked in journalism for 32 years but is also a trained civil engineer, said he had been writing about planning and housing in Ireland for several years, and that the IPI story was a natural one for him to do given it concerned the structures of planning and given that the shortage of housing is the greatest issue currently facing the State.<\/p>\n
He described the two stories, detailing issues in the IPI at the time together with several allegations against Ms Purcell made in the report and found by EY to have been both substantiated and unsubstantiated, as \u201cwhat we call public interest journalism\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cLet\u2019s face it, it\u2019s not the kind of thing that would sell a pile of newspapers,\u201d he told counsel for the defence Brendan Kirwan SC.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat might sound high-minded,\u201d he said. \u201cBut on a basic level, the function that media has in any democracy is to hold power to account and to put out into the public domain that which is public interest.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of the plaintiff, Mr Clifford said: \u201cI have no ill-will towards Ms Purcell whatsoever.\u201d<\/p>\n
Asked by counsel for Ms Purcell, Mark Harty SC, if he agreed that a number of texts sent to him by Ms Purcell in the aftermath of the articles\u2019 publication in January 2023 were \u201cpathetic\u201d or those \u201cof someone in distress, desperate\u201d, Mr Clifford said: \u201cNo, I think that\u2019s unfair\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were angry,\u201d he said. \u201cConfused is the word I would use.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“I had asked for her side of the story [before publication] and was told it wouldn\u2019t be forthcoming\u2026 I didn\u2019t pay an awful lot of attention to them after that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Asked by Mr Kirwan on what basis he had detailed certain allegations against Ms Purcell, including that she had altered a press release signed off on by the then president of the IPI Conor Norton without his knowledge and that she had attempted to create a false narrative of a membership unhappy with Mr Norton\u2019s performance, Mr Clifford said in each case that he had written what was in the EY report. He said:\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n It was a report run by a very reputable firm at arm’s length from the IPI. That to me suggested a process that was scrupulously fair.\u00a0\n <\/p>\n
He said that he would have found the idea that EY \u201cwould have engaged in something underhand\u201d \u2014 Ms Purcell having previously alleged that the report was influenced from within the IPI itself \u2014 as \u201cdifficult to fathom\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cAbsolutely I reported accurately. And if it was tomorrow, I\u2019d report the same thing,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you\u2019re saying to me that because it upset Ms Purcell, and I can understand why, therefore it should not be put out there, I don\u2019t accept that,\u201d he told Mr Harty.<\/p>\n
\u201cI tend to focus on being fair. If there is one thing that keeps me awake at night it is if I was scrupulously fair or not to anybody I may have reported on,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The court later heard from Simon Rattigan, a former forensic accountant with EY who managed \u2014 but did not personally conduct \u2014 the investigation into the IPI.<\/p>\n
Asked \u2014 as alleged by Ms Purcell \u2014 if the IPI\u2019s oversight committee had \u201cimproperly influenced\u201d the findings by EY, Mr Rattigan replied: \u201cI don\u2019t know what that means, but I\u2019m not aware of any attempts by anyone to influence\u201d the report.<\/p>\n
Mr Rattigan said that, in his opinion, the report seen by Mr Clifford was a final one, not a preliminary draft, adding that EY \u201cwere the only ones who came up with the findings\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A senior Irish Examiner journalist has said the basis for two news articles he wrote about the Irish…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":462970,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[9,10,27,18,13,14,6,19,17,11,12,15,16,1109,5,7,8],"class_list":{"0":"post-462969","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ireland","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-courts","11":"tag-eire","12":"tag-featured-news","13":"tag-featurednews","14":"tag-headlines","15":"tag-ie","16":"tag-ireland","17":"tag-latest-news","18":"tag-latestnews","19":"tag-main-news","20":"tag-mainnews","21":"tag-media","22":"tag-news","23":"tag-top-stories","24":"tag-topstories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116498517668733822","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=462969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462969\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/462970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=462969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=462969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=462969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}