Soft Irish Rain

Exactly how powerful IS the media?

Some recent, seemingly unrelated incidents have got me thinking.
For several days last week and the week before, the Liveline airwaves jolted with some truly shocking tales of random violence on the streets of Tipperary Town. While most incidents appear to have occurred on St Patrick’s Day, and some it appears within sight of patrolling gardai, it seems it has been an ongoing problem for months or maybe even longer.
In one incident on our national holiday, a garda approached a man who had just assaulted someone and told him he couldn’t be hitting people like that. But it didn’t end there.
One young American visitor had to cut his holiday short after he was attacked on the street in sight of his girlfriend and sister.
Caller after caller recounted assaults that for the most part went unreported or un-investigated by gardai. One woman even claimed that she and her daughter were advised by a garda not to press charges for fear of negative repercussions.
By last tuesday it seemed clear that the attacks were emanating from one unnamed family group who, if the callers are to be believed have been terrorising the townspeople unhindered.
Then comes the extraordinary news live on air of a major garda operation involving armed and unarmed patrols, special response units- hitherto deployed in the gangland strongholds of Limerick- and wait for it, a garda helicopter, as gardai closed in on suspects.
Coincidence or what?
Good news no doubt for the good people of Tipp Town who want their streets back but, really? Is that what it takes to get action and is that level of force actually required?
The second incident was a little more benign but nonetheless troubling. It began last Sunday with a report in the Sunday Tribune of a so-called guerrilla artist hanging unflattering paintings of Taoiseach Brian Cowen in two Dublin galleries. By Monday, the story was picked up by several tabloid newspapers but when it was reported on the flagship 9pm news bulletin by the national broadcaster, RTE it provoked the ire of the Fianna Fail press officer who complained to RTE. One outraged Dublin TD even called for the RTE Director General to stand down. The artist had made email contact with independent radio station Today FM which was then visited by gardai demanding access to the emails in their bid to track him down. You have to wonder who ordered this. As it turned out the artist voluntarily showed up to make a statement to gardai- before the helicopter and the emergency response unit were deployed…..
And then there is the ongoing high profile asylum case of Nigerian mother Pamela Izevbekhai who claims that her daughters are under threat of female genital mutilation if they are forced to return to Nigeria. They have lived in Ireland for four years and have received a large amount of media attention because Pamela’s oldest daughter Elizabeth bled to death as a result of the brutal procedure when she was a baby.
But this is now being disputed after it emerged that two gardai had travelled to Nigeria to verify Pamela’s story and had interviewed the doctor who had previously verified her story. He is now saying there never was such a baby or such an incident. And he is demanding money from any media outlet that wants to interview him.
Is every asylum case investigated so meticulously by the Garda Siochana?
Pamela is already fighting a deportation order and her case has been taken up by the European Court of Human Rights. It would be highly embarrassing for Ireland to be shown to have got it wrong.

Three separate stories with a common thread.
They are all about saving face in the court of public opinion, whatever the financial or in some cases, human cost.

The Tory Island home of Neville Presho, marked on either side of building with an x, in 1976 before it was demolished.

Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.
Imagine boarding up your holiday home on a remote island off the Irish coast and heading off to New Zealand only to return eight years later to find an empty space.
That’s exactly what happened to engineer-turned documentary maker, Neville Presho, who is currently in the Irish courts fighting for compensation.
The island in question is Tory off Donegal’s north west coast.
Presho first visited it in 1976 and like many before him and since was beguiled by its remote beauty. A few years later he purchased a six bedroomed two storey house on the edge of the Atlantic and used it as a holiday home for his frequent visits over subsequent years.
Presho had big ideas, big ambitions, big aspirations for his new island home and its Gaeltacht people. He wanted to help but he was a man who jumped from one idea to the next and soon New Zealand beckoned.
In his absence, his house was first squatted in by visiting trades-people and later mysteriously burned, finally falling down, and vanishing, stone by stone without a trace. In its place was what looked like a car park and the septic tank for the new hotel directly across the road.
When gardai investigated no one knew anything, not even the island king, Patsy Dan Rodgers, who personally welcomes all visitors to the island.
Hotelier, Pat Doohan maintains the house burned down as a result of dodgy wiring and the weather finished it off.

Presho, suffering from bi-polar disorder, diagnosed for the first time after his house disappeared, believes it was malicious and prays for the wrong doers. His life lies in tatters. Marriage over, he is estranged from his children and his home.
Constrained by the statute of limitation, he may not get the justice he so desperately craves. A High Court judge will deliver his ruling at the end of the month.