The inconvenient truth for bosses in the news media is that Fianna Fáil’s hiring of Ivan Yates as a communication coach has been public knowledge for almost four years.
The Irish Daily Mail reported on January 2nd, 2022, that the party’s head of communications, Siobhán Russell, had recruited the former Fine Gael minister and bookie. It quoted Fianna Fáil Senator Fiona O’Loughlin as saying the training “was certainly worthwhile”.
Ten days later, the Clare Echo reported that local TD Cathal Crowe had attended a three-hour Fianna Fáil workshop on media interview skills given by Yates. “He was a hardball interviewer himself,” the paper quoted Crowe. “He played out interview scenarios with those of us in attendance.”
The national airwaves have been crackling with journalists demanding to know why Fianna Fáil did not inform its Coalition partner that it employed Yates to train its presidential candidate, Jim Gavin.
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The bigger question of why national broadcasting bosses kept trotting Yates out as a supposedly objective current affairs presenter-cum-commentator without any declaration of his conflicting interests went unasked. It’s time the media C-suite removed the mote from its own eye. The scandal at the heart of this controversy is not a political one. It is a media scandal.
TV3 – Virgin Media’s forerunner – knowingly opted for shock-jock audience ratings over journalistic ethics when it employed Yates to present the Tonight Show in September 2013. His Celtic Bookmakers chain of gambling shops had gone into receivership owing €6 million to AIB, precipitating his departure to Wales for a year’s bankruptcy exile. In a newspaper interview, he accused the bank of vindictiveness and of harassing and intimidating his family.
The demarcation lines have been further smudged here by the departure of more than a dozen journalists from the news media who are now working for the Government
The bank issued a statement of denial. Two days after Yates emerged from bankruptcy, he presented the TV3 show “asking if banks are doing enough to tackle Ireland’s mortgage arrears problems”, according to a report on the promo. “We’ll also look ahead to the new personal insolvency arrangement due to begin next week. Will they work for debtors or will the banks still hold the balance of power?”
To defuse the brass-neckery of this screaming conflict of interest, Yates delivered a disclaimer at the start of the show, seeking to “assure viewers that my own views will not impede me from carrying out a fair and balanced debate on the issue”.
Yates is a professional provocateur. “Bullshit” is one of his trademark words. “Arsed” – as in “I couldn’t be” – is another. His “smear the bejaysus out of her” has entered the Irish lexicon of quotable turpitude. Find it above “picked it out of my arse” (Anglo Irish Bank’s John Bowe) and “will we f**k?” (property developer Mick Bailey).
A son of establishment cloth, Yates equips himself with the arsenal of the fake revolutionary. He scorns the “woke media” that has given him the platform to charge someone €1,500, according to figures quoted in 2021, for a day’s media training. He has not hidden his disregard for journalistic standards. On the contrary, he has paraded it as core to his CV.
On his last edition as presenter of the Hard Shoulder, he signed off saying he had “derided [and] ridiculed everyone that has come on the line against me”. He thanked Newstalk for putting up with the complaints from listeners and the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland.
“I just want you to know that, yes, some of it is contrived because we’re in the business of being different.”
That business is called entertainment.
The danger is that many people mistake it for journalism. Broadcasting executives collude in this misconception by blurring the demarcation lines. Stations such as Newstalk, when it was owned by Communicorp, and the erstwhile TV3, turn willing loudmouths into current affairs presenters and, next thing, they are appearing on RTÉ as commentators.
See the rise and fall of George Hook.
How curious that RTÉ postponed a Scannal documentary on the Moriarty tribunal report during the presidential election campaign but seems to have had no compunction about featuring Yates as an ostensibly impartial commentator in the four years since he began training Fianna Fáilers.
In the US, ex-Fox News controversialists are now kingpins in the department of war, negotiating America’s relations with Israel, Ukraine and Russia, advising on national security and running the FBI.
At White House briefings, the clock at question time is run down by quasi-journalist podcasters brought in to massage Donald Trump’s ego. Eroding the distinction between journalism and performance is the start of a treacherously slippery slope.
[ Ivan Yates controversy shows why media must take conflicts of interest seriouslyOpens in new window ]
The demarcation lines have been further smudged here by the departure of more than a dozen journalists from the news media who are now working for the Government. A big reason is that journalists, who are professionally required to comply with linguistic and ethical standards, are in general not lavishly paid – unlike certain celebrity shock-jocks.
Yates presented Pat Kenny’s Newstalk show on September 24th, the day nominations closed for the presidential election and the day after he started coaching its candidate. “Jim Gavin has a clear run in Dublin,” he remarked on air, declaring geography would be a factor in the election.
On Gavin’s GAA credentials, he opined that “the network of clubs – junior clubs even – runs deep in the psyche of people’s sense of identity”. When programme guest Sineád O’Carroll, editor of The Journal, noted Gavin’s lack of charisma, Yates responded: “The public don’t really know him yet.”
On October 11th on the Path to Power podcast, from which he has been dropped, he speculated that the rent overpayment Gavin then owed to a former tenant – which proved to be the downfall of his campaign – could have gone to the bank that held the mortgage on the property. “It would not surprise me if Jim did not get the benefit of this money,” he surmised.
These utterances may have been valid but they assume significance after Yates’s failure to declare his own commercial interest in Gavin’s success. When he delivered a podcast riff last January on Darragh O’Brien potentially becoming Fianna Fáil’s next leader, he did not mention he had coached the Minister for Transport for the 2024 general election.
This information was in the public domain. Journalists have grilled Fianna Fáil for failing to do adequate due diligence before selecting Gavin as its candidate. But where was the broadcast media’s due diligence when it selected Yates?
