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SOME HEATED comments on RTÉ’s Liveline programme in September last have resulted in a suit for defamation being lodged by Dún Laoghaire businessman Don McManus. The performance of a relatively new initiative – involving local councils and private operators combining to run a so-called ‘Business Investment District’ (BID) – has resulted in much grumbling and… Read more »

THE tardiness of West Midlands Police in investigating the true identities of those responsible for the 1974 Birmingham bombs has been underlined by their leisurely pace in securing an interview with ex-IRA Director of Intelligence, Kieran Conway. The former senior IRA man is the author of a memoir, Southside Provisional, published in late 2014 and… Read more »

INTERESTING to see financier and investor Conor Killeen of Key Capital, who took control of the Sunday Business Post in 2014, now playing in another part of the media pitch, with a significant investment in Balls.ie, headed up by Ger ‘Off The Ball’ Gilroy. Since 2010, the irreverent sports website, Balls.ie, has been attracting critical… Read more »

WICKLOW COUNTY COUNCIL (WCC) is a much duller place in the absence of its former county manager, the combative Eddie Sheehy, whose relations with various county councillors were often fractious and who retired as council boss last year. During his time at the head of WCC, Sheehy kept its lawyers busy and was involved in… Read more »

MORE ON that Mary Robinson Centre (MRC), the multi-million euro project proposed for Robbo’s family home in Ballina. The question of exactly how the Mayo County Council intends to pay the €1.5m it has committed to the project has been raised and there are few answers evident at a time when councillors are getting worried… Read more »

DENIS O’BRIEN is not known for his sense of humour, especially when it comes to the media, so comparing him to Adolf Hitler was never a wise move by The Irish Sun. Last summer, O’Brien showed his low threshold for satire when the website Waterford Whispers had to remove an article about the moneybags following… Read more »

COULD it possibly be that the RTÉ board will hire Lucy Gaffney, right hand woman in Denis O’Brien’s media empire, as director general of the national broadcaster? And would communications minister Alex White approve such an appointment? If Gaffney does actually land the job she will not be a stranger to RTÉ board chairwoman, Moya… Read more »

IS RTÉ easy prey for the farming lobby? One might expect that the largely liberal programmers in the national broadcaster would be enthusiastic about global efforts to combat climate change, but a comprehensive complaint to Montrose from An Taisce has the most damning things to say about the station’s coverage of this most fundamental issue…. Read more »

FOREIGN minister Charlie Flanagan was not best pleased to see Sinn Féin MEP Lynn Boylan rip apart his softy-softly strategy on Ibrahim Halawa – held now for nearly 900 days in an Egyptian jail without trial – in an Irish Times spread recently. Boylan had assailed IT foreign affairs correspondent Ruadhán Mac Cormaic on Twitter,… Read more »

FINE GAEL and Enda Kenny’s’ target of three seats in the Taoiseach’s revised four-seat Mayo constituency will be even harder to achieve than their triumph in taking four seats out of the five available in 2011. And while it is almost inconceivable that a sitting Taoiseach would lose his seat, Kenny’s relative unpopularity locally has… Read more »