One of the very few hard and fast rules that I have for the staff here at Gript is “don’t write about yourself, because you’re not the news”. I must therefore apologise to them for breaking that rule, this Monday morning, because it seems that in recent days I have become – at least for some people – the news.
On Saturday morning, if you haven’t seen it, Village Magazine, which has been around forever, released the front page for the latest edition. The one redeeming thing I’d say is that, unlike other picture desks I could mention, they at least used a photo of me taken in the last decade:
Village February-March is in shops now! pic.twitter.com/wDyWgo5Vlk
— Village Magazine (@VillageMagIRE) February 17, 2024
That front page is, of course, basically an invitation to sue for defamation, and the article itself somehow even more so. It is the journalistic equivalent of rolling out the red carpet and employing nice young ladies to hand the arriving barristers flutes of champagne with strawberries neatly impaled around the rim. It is no surprise that much of the reaction to it yesterday from Gript readers and, in fairness, many others, was to celebrate on my behalf the forthcoming and generous settlement which, those who wrote such reactions believed, I would surely be shortly obtaining.
Of course, and alas, things aren’t quite that simple.
The following table shows the reported financial performance of Ormond Quay Publishing Ltd, the company that owns and operates Village Magazine, between 2012 and 2022. You may note that Village Magazine appears to be a bit tight for cash, and that the years since 2014 have not been kind to their bottom line.
Put simply, this is an invitation to enter into a lengthy, drawn out, and expensive legal case which, assuming it were to succeed, might very well end with Village Magazine declaring bankruptcy and being unable to pay either my costs or, indeed, any damages. This is a publication, after all, which cost its former editor, and my old sparring partner, Vincent Browne €1.5m just to keep it open, and led to him being forced to sell his own house to meet the bills.
When facing an organisation which seems to be struggling financially, but could perhaps use news of being sued by Gript to rally their supporters behind them, it makes sense to question if being sued is not exactly what they want. From our perspective this looks like a game of heads we win, tails you get nothing, and so it probably makes more strategic sense to for us to simply decline to play. That’s not to say we will not respond, we will, but it won’t be through a high court action.
There’s another reason, too: You can’t talk about lawsuits, really, when you’re a party to them. Solicitors frown on it, barristers even more so. As a result, the accusation made against me and against Gript Media would hang in the air, unanswered, for the several years it generally takes for these cases to reach a courtroom, by which time the vast majority of people would have forgotten that the accusation was ever made. It is more important, and helpful, I think, that it is addressed now.
Let us begin with the elephant in the room: Racism and stirring up hatred. Both Gript Media, and me as its editor, are voluntarily, but strictly, regulated by the Press Council of Ireland. The Press Council of Ireland expressly prohibits the publication, under article 8 of the code of practice, of any material “intended or likely to cause grave offence or stir up hatred against an individual or group on the basis of their race, religion, nationality, colour, ethnic origin, membership of the travelling community, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, illness or age.”
It is open to every member of the public, including all the staff, owners, and writers for Village Magazine, to make a complaint to the press council about any of the content which appears on Gript Media, including my own articles, and to have it declared in breach of the code of practice. Not one article about immigration or race which has ever appeared on these pages has ever been found to be in breach of that code. Nor has – to my knowledge – any representative, employee, or agent of Village Magazine ever even submitted a complaint alleging such a breach.
The same, incidentally, is true of the allegation about “lies”. Gript Media is bound not only by principle 8, but also by principle 1: “Truth and accuracy”. In the four years of our membership of the Press Council, we have had one complaint upheld against us on this score. It was not in relation to immigration, but in relation to an inadvertent misquoting of Senator Ronan Mullen by a then-trainee reporter.
The point here is simple: There is a mechanism to hold both Gript Media, and me, to account for the kind of misconduct that Village Magazine alleges. They have never used it.
We, however, will use it. Village Magazine is also a signatory of the Press Council, and so I plan to shortly lodge a complaint with the Press Council about the Village piece and front page.
But back to the topic of their general complaint: Our coverage of immigration and its consequences has, undoubtedly, been significantly different in tone than that of other media outlets. I am proud of that.
Indeed, it was yours truly who wrote in March 2021, nearly three years ago and before even the War in Ukraine, that:
There’s a substantial difference between being anti-immigrant – which we are not, here at Gript – and in favour of a sane and reasonable immigration policy. This policy, and the Government’s general approach, is neither sane, nor reasonable. It asks nothing of prospective immigrants, but gives them some of the most generous benefits (if not the most generous) to people in their situation of any country in the world.
This policy, and indeed the Government’s whole suite of immigration reforms, will attract more asylum seekers. It will put pressure on public services, and the public purse. And it will create even more of the “us and them” attitudes in the public that the Government says it deplores.
It is foolishness of the highest order.
Time, I would argue, has proved those words both prescient, and correct. It is also a clear statement of our editorial line: We are not in any way anti-immigrant, since no immigrant can be blamed for the desire to come to Ireland and make a better life for themselves. We are, however, deeply sceptical of an immigration policy that has – and is continuing to – hurt everybody, and damaged social cohesion.
It is true that Gript has written a substantial amount about immigration over the past year, a situation which Village is quick to suggest proves an underlying racism on Gript’s part. But the simple truth of the matter is that Gript is a small organisation which focuses its energy on the topics and discussions which we feel are not being represented fairly by politicians and journalists. Immigration is currently such a topic, just as the measures taken by the Government to fight against COVID were in previous years.
We are the media outlet that has most consistently refused to accept at face value Government and establishment claims that the present crisis was in some way inevitable, and that our politicians are in some way victims of circumstance. The truth is that in 2021, before the crisis developed, the Irish state was announcing free third level education for migrants, advertising own-door accommodation at the expense of the Irish taxpayer, and some of the most generous benefits in Europe. As I wrote at the time:
You might reasonably be concerned, also, that the Government seems absolutely intent on creating so-called “pull factors” for immigration into Ireland. Consider that the Government’s policy now is that if you arrive here as an asylum seeker, they will give you your own home, and front door key, within six months, and pay for free third level education for your children. Both those moves have been announced in the past few weeks. Why on earth would any sane asylum seeker seek asylum anywhere else in Europe? They’d have to be mad.
None of this is anti-immigrant. Immigrants are, at the end of the day, only acting rationally. You would indeed have had to be mad to apply for asylum in Austria, say, rather than in Ireland, on the basis of what the Irish Government was offering. We’re living with the fruits of that now, and more pertinently, the fruits of the fact that the rest of the media tried to cast anybody raising such concerns as racist.
Back to Village Magazine: I do not intend, for what it’s worth, to get into a slagging match with the publication except to say that it is somewhat flattering, in its own way, that it apparently believes that my face will help it sell more copies than usual.
What I will say is this: I’m never happy to see a media publication struggle, but, if Village is in the terrible financial position it appears to be, my view is that it’s happening precisely because less and less of the public are buying what it is selling. When I read the piece I didn’t see it as an attack on myself, although it is certainly deeply unpleasant to have to consider if one of your neighbours might see it and think the worst of you, because I thought that the message of the piece was simply an extreme representation of something the Irish public is beyond exhausted with: The idea that any questioning of the state’s and the government’s responsibility for the present social unrest and unhappiness is somehow verboten and dangerous and unpatriotic, if not outright hateful.
Incidentally, over the last week Gript has been conducting surveys of its readership about why they read Gript and the issues they are concerned about. It wasn’t intended that that survey be published beyond Gript’s subscribers, but it’s worth letting you know some of the stats so that you can see who it is who reads Gript.
Over 90% of our readers say they are very concerned about the direction that Ireland is moving in culturally and politically, and over 90% said that they do not believe mainstream media in Ireland reflects or represents their views and concerns. Roughly 95%, said that their trust in the mainstream media had declined over the past year. When asked if they agreed with certain statements about Gript the two most common statements people agreed with were “The growth of independent media like Gript will mean my views and concerns are better represented” and “Gript has had a positive impact on Ireland.”
The people we write for, the people who read our work, are not people filled with hatred or resentment, they are people who feel, perfectly reasonably, that their views are no longer represented, or even respected at a basic level, by politicians and the media. They are people who want to see Ireland succeed but are concerned with the direction that they’re being told Ireland must go.
The left in Ireland – which Village at least purports to represent – has lost control of the narrative around immigration, and around a raft of other issues.
When you see things like the recent piece in Village Magazine you should think of the growing left-wing anger in this country, how largely impotent that anger has become, and how it an anger which is increasingly targeted at the Irish public who, if polls are accurate, substantially share my views on this issue.
Were Gript Media not speaking for a growing share of the Irish public, we could be safely ignored.
When Gript launched I recall seeing people who shared our content on social media being sent messages by some of our friends in the progressive left telling them they should never engage with our content; saying they’d be tainted by association with us if they didn’t ignore our content entirely. The hope was clearly that ignoring Gript would kill it. But we survived, and we’ve grown, thanks to the support of our readers and subscribers. We’ve grown so much we’re hard to ignore, and so they attack.
Gript has made mistakes, and it’s perfectly fair to criticise us for those mistakes, but it’s clear that many of the attacks against us are not actually based on holding us to account for mistakes we have made, but rather on a fear that Gript is a threat of some kind to those in power, including those who hold cultural power in this country. That may well be a prudent fear given that it often feels like we’re the last media outlet in Ireland who believe that a threat of some kind to those in power is exactly what the media should be. That’s our job.
If you think we’re doing it well, then I’d ask you to consider that the best answer to Village is to take out a Gript Media subscription and help us to grow our team. We do not, and will not ever, take funding from the state either directly or indirectly. It is that, I believe, that is the only guarantee of our independence.