Ivan Yates’s exhortation to Fine Gael during a Newstalk podcast to “smear the bejaysus” out of Catherine Connolly in the presidential campaign was true to form for the broadcaster and former politician.
Since arriving in the media industry in 2010, Yates’s trademark approach has been to stir controversy with colourful language.
For example, while hosting a debate on Virgin Media One during the 2018 presidential election, he described Michael D Higgins as a “pompous poet probably past his sell-by date”.
Then, in a 2020 general election debate on TV, he had the chutzpah to accuse the seven party leaders on stage of being a “bunch of charlatans and chancers”.
RM Block
The 66-year-old Wexford man has made a career out of seizing opportunities that benefit himself and making no excuses for it.
He told an interviewer in 2010: “If you want to live your life in a certain way, if you want to have a bet, if you want to have a drink, if you want to have an affair, that really doesn’t bother me. I’m a live-and-let-live type of person. I don’t moralise or preach to people.”
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There are four distinct phases to Yates’s eclectic career: youthful farmer; career politician; building up a betting empire, which collapsed; and, latterly, as broadcaster and public speaker.
Born in 1959, Yates is from a long-established farming family from Enniscorthy. He boarded at St Columba’s College in Dublin before attending Gurteen Agricultural College at the age of 16. He farmed at home for two years. During that time, he became interested in politics. Because he was a free marketeer and from a Church of Ireland background, he gravitated towards Fine Gael. At the age of 21, he was elected to Wexford County Council and then to the Dáil in 1981, becoming the youngest TD in the house.
His Dáil career lasted 20 years, much of which was spent on the Fine Gael front bench, often as spokesman on agriculture. A strong supporter of John Bruton, he was made minister for agriculture in the 1994-1997 rainbow coalition. Yates was a smooth talker, self-confident and seen as an arch pragmatist.
Some considered him a natural successor to Bruton. But during this time, he had been building up his Celtic Bookmaker business. By then, it had 10 shops, mainly in the southeast. He retired from politics in 2002 to focus on his burgeoning business. Within a few years, it had expanded to 63 shops.
However, the business went into receivership in 2011, and AIB pursued him for debts of €3.6 million.
Yates’s next move was contentious. At the time, a person in the Republic who was declared bankrupt had to wait 12 years before exiting. Yates declared bankruptcy in Wales in 2012, declaring that country as his centre of interests. He lived there for a year, at which point the bankruptcy was discharged.
He had already begun broadcasting by then and returned to it and as an event speaker on his return. As a presenter, he described himself as “being on both sides of the mic” as he saw himself more in the vein of a commentator rather than as a journalist.
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Perhaps it’s that self-perception that has been the root cause of the latest controversy, where he did work for a particular candidate during the election campaign, while also being involved as a commentator on podcasts and radio stations.
For career journalists and broadcasters, being commissioned to do media training for a political organisation would be seen as a clear conflict of interest.
For Professor David Farrell of UCD, this should be the case in regulated and unregulated environments. “If I had a podcast tomorrow and had done work for one of the political parties, and now started to talk about the political parties, particularly in the heat of the election campaign, it would be basic common sense and appropriate behaviour to disclose the fact that I’d worked for that party, even if there’s no regulatory requirement on my part to do it.”
