The Irish Times does not like Nick Delehanty

Good for him

I am familiar, dear reader, with the newfound press interest in Nick Delehanty. An old hand at it, you might say.

Yesterday, the Irish Times decided that the closure of his small business – something that happens every day in this country, sadly – was near the top of the news agenda.

Here’s how they covered it, with the adjectives highlighted:

A dog daycare business run by failed Independent presidential election candidate Nick Delehanty has gone into liquidation, with the loss of 10 jobs…

… Delehanty, a critic of multiculturalism and public spending on international protection, failed to secure local authority support for a nomination to contest the presidential election last year. With a slogan promising to “make crime illegal”, he also campaigned unsuccessfully in the last general and local elections…

…Delehanty grew up on a pig farm in Co Tipperary and attended Clongowes Wood College private school in Co Kildare.

Failed. Failed. Unsuccessful. Failed Critic of Multiculturalism, Failure Nick Delehanty. Did you get that? He’s a failure. Oh, and he went to Clongowes, so laugh more.

I’m not here to champion Delehanty, or anyone else. But whatever else you think of him, he built a business that employed ten people. There are not many in the Irish Times who will ever be able to say that.

What I will do is say that I’m familiar with the pattern: I’ve had my fair share of media coverage from Ireland’s press corps over the years, and the most reliable way to get it, in my experience, is to have something bad happen to you, or suffer a setback.

If you don’t subscribe to the blessed consensus in Ireland, they’ll ignore everything that you say or do, until there’s a chance to tell people that something went wrong.

And then, it turns out, you were newsworthy all along.

It’s entirely deliberate. You are supposed to notice it. It is the closest you get to a two-fingered salute, and an open admission of what they are.

Last week, Delehanty posted a whole series of figures about the Dublin housing lists and the preponderance of foreign applicants on them. His material, not for the first time, went viral online.

The Irish media did not consider it worthy of coverage.

Perhaps, you might think, they simply didn’t notice. Perhaps the likes of Delehanty – or yours truly, or Paul Treyvaud, or six dozen others – are simply beneath their notice.

But you’ll note how fast they were to notice when something went wrong.

Are we seriously expected to believe that figures about Dublin City Council’s housing lists, circulating widely online, somehow escaped the attention of the same journalists who were sufficiently interested in Delehanty to report promptly on the liquidation of his dog-daycare business?

Taken in the round, the message is fairly obvious: it is important that the public understands that Delehanty is a failure but considerably less important that the public hears what he has to say.

The purpose of this is delegitimisation.

I know something about it, as some of you may recall.

During the pandemic, I went on Prime Time. It was to be my final appearance on RTÉ. During that appearance, I made an error: In a throwaway sentence, I conflated two fringe republican groups, Éirígí and Saoradh, connecting the wrong one to the dissident republicans who murdered journalist Lyra McKee in Derry.

I corrected the error almost immediately after becoming aware of it, and the presenter herself corrected it on air.

I was never sued.

There is, in fact, substantial legal authority against the proposition that a political party should be permitted to sue for defamation at all. In Goldsmith v Bhoyrul, the English High Court held that permitting political parties to bring defamation actions would improperly inhibit democratic debate.

There does not appear to be any equivalent Irish authority establishing that an Irish political party can successfully bring such an action. No Irish political party has ever sued for defamation, and lots of them have been accused by opponents of truly terrible things.

Nevertheless, RTÉ settled with Éirígí within little more than two weeks, agreeing to make €20,000 in payments to three charities.

And every media outlet immediately ran with some version of: lousy McGuirk costs RTÉ 20 grand.

Likewise, my departure from Gript Media achieved more coverage in seven or eight days than almost anything I had achieved there received in seven or eight years.

I am not so full of myself as to suggest a personal conspiracy against me, dear reader. The point is not me. The point is the pattern.

This was, after all, the same national broadcaster which falsely accused Fr Kevin Reynolds of fathering a child with a teenage girl in Africa – an allegation RTÉ subsequently admitted was baseless and should never have been broadcast.

It was also the broadcaster which ended up apologising to Kevin Myers after describing him as a Holocaust denier – an allegation it ultimately accepted was untrue and defamatory.

People outside the approved consensus tend to receive what we might term the media’s institutional scepticism. Accusations against them are interesting. Their failures are newsworthy. Their setbacks are worth recording. Their successes, arguments and inconvenient statistics considerably less so.

That is gatekeeping. And when it is practiced consistently in one ideological direction, it becomes something more than ordinary editorial judgement. It becomes a means of delegitimising opponents of the consensus while maintaining the comforting fiction that no such consensus exists.

Nick Delehanty will confirm that I’ve only actually met him once or twice. But I suspect he’ll be back. He’s got that drive to actually do things that most journalists in my experience lack.

I further suspect that the institutional decline of the Irish media - not one of which can now survive without taxpayer subsidy - shall continue.

And it shall continue to be well deserved.