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Media Minister Patrick O’Donovan has been slammed by ‘Father Ted’ creator Graham Linehan, who urged the Minister to ‘keep my characters names out of your mouth’.
Speaking to Gript this week, the Irish comedy writer – famous for producing ‘The IT Crowd’, ‘Count Arthur Strong’ and more – responded to the Fine Gael Minister’s repeated references to the Father Ted character Dougal during press interactions.
On more than one occasion in recent months, in answer to Gript’s repeated questioning about the State’s planned misinformation regulations, the Minister simply replied by repeating a joke from Fr. Ted in which the famously stupid character Fr. Dougal is unable to understand how things get bigger or smaller depending on how far away they are, and needs to have it explained to him in child-like terms using a toy cow and a real cow. O’Donovan used this as an analogy for how the State needs to help differentiate misinformation for people.
Responding to this, Linehan did not mince words.
“Coming from a government which believes that some men are actually women, it makes perfect sense that they would invoke Dougal, who famously couldn’t tell dreams from reality,” he said, adding: “I would respectfully ask all of these disingenuous, worthless politicians to keep my characters names out of their mouths.”
Linehan further stated that he thought it was not acceptable for a senior cabinet Minister to make Fr. Ted jokes in response to media questions.
“One of the unpleasant things about writing Father Ted is seeing it adopted by morons who think they’re Ted when they’re actually Dougal,” he added.
Gript had specifically asked the Minister about the fact that the Department of Communications has admitted they have done no analysis on the potential free speech impact of misinformation and disinformation regulations on free speech.
When asked to explain this, Minister O’Donovan has repeatedly refused to engage or respond to the point.
However, this week Taoiseach Micheál Martin said that he would be open to conducting such analysis.
Taoiseach open to analysing free speech impact of misinfo rules
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