How low Hacks Journalist Paul Williams & Paul Reynolds will go to cozy up to corrupt senior Gardai
How low hacks Journalist Paul Williams & Paul Reynolds will go to cozy up to corrupt senior Gardai, and destroy anyone they can even though they are innocent.
Just ask whistleblowers M McCabe, E Doherty & J Wilson etc
JUSTINE MCCARTHY PUTS IT UP TO PAUL WILLIAMS AND PAUL REYNOLDS
"The Sunday Times", 12 February 2017:
Name and shame the rumour-mongers who slurred Maurice McCabe
JUSTINE McCARTHY
On April 12, 2014, the Irish Independent published a report beneath the headline: "Girl wants new probe into alleged sexual assault by garda." Written by Paul Williams, a crime correspondent, it said: "A young woman who was allegedly sexually assaulted as a child by a serving garda claims the incident was covered up through a botched investigation. The woman claims she was six when a colleague of her garda father abused her. Both men are still serving members of the force."
Any journalist who had contemplated reporting on the allegations of misconduct being made by the whistleblower Sgt Maurice McCabe recognised him as the unidentified garda in Williams's story. For we had been warned to treat McCabe with the utmost suspicion. Generally, it was crime reporters who received the warning from their garda sources, and relayed a tread-carefully SOS to non-crime beat colleagues, who get shorter shrift from the garda press office. The former head of that office, Superintendent David Taylor, has alleged he was instructed to traduce McCabe in briefings to journalists. In defamation law, to call someone a child sexual abuser is the most serious allegation you can make, being devoid of any possible justification.
On April 15 that year, Williams filed a second report, this one headlined: "Alleged garda sex victim wants to meet Martin." It said the woman was seeking a meeting with Micheál Martin, noting that the Fianna Fail leader had previously referred a dossier of alleged garda malpractice to the taoiseach. That dossier triggered an inquiry by Seán Guerin, a senior counsel, whose report was published on May 9, 2014, leading to Alan Shatter's resignation as justice minister and the establishment of the Fennelly Commission.
Martin Callinan had already resigned as garda commissioner, following a protracted controversy about malpractice in the force. Nóirín O'Sullivan had been appointed acting commissioner, until the position officially became hers on November 25, 2014.
On May 5, Williams filed a third report, following a meeting between the woman and Martin. "Kenny to set up probe into garda sex abuse claims," the headline wrongly forecast. It quoted a spokesman for Martin as saying: "He listened closely to what she had to say and he took her allegations very seriously and he has written to the taoiseach." Williams said the woman was due to meet investigators from the Garda Siochana Ombudsman Commission (Gsoc) and that she was taking legal advice about taking court action for damages.
Referring to the garda investigation of her complaint, Williams added: "A file was sent to the DPP who decided the officer did not have a case to answer." In fact, the DPP's instruction to gardai was more succinct. It said: "No offence disclosed."
Williams's reports began appearing in the same month that Tusla, the state's child and family agency, created separate files on McCabe and each of his children, erroneously stating that he stood accused of penetrative child sexual assault. McCabe was oblivious to the existence of this information, available to garda colleagues on the force's Pulse intelligence system. He had been barred from accessing Pulse by a superior officer in late 2012 after he and John Wilson, a former garda, revealed that senior officers were quashing penalty points for favoured motorists.
Why, one wonders, would a garda's daughter who believed herself the victim of a garda cover-up contact a crime writer known to have contacts at the highest level of the force? If, on the other hand, it was Williams who made the approach to her, who gave the journalist her name and contact details? Furthermore, after Enda Kenny received Martin's letter about the woman's allegations, did Martin, the taoiseach or his staff contact Tusla to alert the child protection agency? If so, did Tusla tell them it already had individual files on McCabe's family? The choreography is the key to understanding the significance of these Kafkaesque events. In December 2015, Tusla contacted McCabe, saying it had information he might be a danger to children, on foot of a counsellor's erroneous complaint relating to the same woman. At that time, Kevin O'Higgins, a retired High Court judge appointed to investigate McCabe's complaints of substandard garda investigations in the Cavan/Monaghan division, was preparing his draft report for the government.
It was also just weeks after a failed bid to discredit McCabe behind the closed doors of O'Higgins's commission. As Michael Clifford revealed in the Irish Examiner last May, O'Sullivan's senior counsel was planning to question McCabe's motivation and credibility arising out of a meeting in 2008 during which it was alleged he admitted being motivated by a grudge against a senior colleague. McCabe had said no such thing, as O'Higgins acknowledged after the sergeant produced a recording of the 2008 meeting.
Even after Clifford's story was published, the whispering campaign continued. Garda sources told their journalist contacts the reported smearing of McCabe at the commission was untrue and evidence would emerge to disprove it. Ten months later, that evidence has not materialised. Luckily for the top brass, O'Higgins's report never mentioned the exchanges about McCabe's motivation or the 2008 meeting.
Two days before the report was published on May 11, the RTE crime correspondent Paul Reynolds reported extensively from exclusively leaked extracts that Higgins had found McCabe "prone to exaggeration, and while some of his complaints were upheld, others were proven to be overstated, exaggerated, unfounded and ultimately withdrawn".
None of this is to impute wrongdoing by Williams, Reynolds or their colleagues. Journalists rely on contacts for information. Protecting sources' anonymity is a cherished principle of the trade. But, in this case, trust was demolished in the relationship between some journalists and their sources. The debt is cancelled.
Even in media outlets that refrained from reporting the spurious claims, the campaign to vilify McCabe exerted a chilling effect and is partly the reason this controversy has gone on for years. Apart from the anguish this caused the sergeant, his wife and their children, the relentless denigration of McCabe put the safety of Irish citizens at risk by deterring urgent examination of what is rotten in the country's law enforcement. That is not to mention how such a vicious campaign has accelerated the disintegration of public morality.
We journalists, even if inadvertently, facilitated it by not properly interrogating the false rumours against McCabe. There is an onus on us now to correct the record. We can start by dispensing with the shield of protecting our sources. Why protect a source on whom you cannot rely to tell the truth? Those of us who know the identities of the rumour-mongers have a duty to go to the Charleton Commission and name those names. Journalists' first obligation is to the truth.
Paul Williams who had penalty points wiped by gardai wanted it covered up
https://m.independent.ie/irish-news/td-abused-privilege-by-naming-writer-and-rugby-player-over-penalty-points/28946515.html
Newstalk presenter Paul Williams rebuked by watchdog over Jobstown rant
Paul Williams, one of Newstalk’s presenters, has been criticised by the broadcasting watchdog over his use of offensive language about participants in the Jobstown protest.
The station, which is owned by Denis O’Brien, also had a complaint upheld against it over remarks made about rape victims by George Hook, which resulted in the broadcaster’s suspension from Newstalk last year.
The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) upheld two complaints against Williams, the co-presenter of Newstalk Breakfast, over his description of those involved in a demonstration in Jobstown three years ago as “bastards”, “assholes”, “thugs” and “bullyboys” during a programme on July 27 last year.
Joan Burton, the former tánaiste and Labour leader, was forced to wait in her car during a protest outside a graduation ceremony in Jobstown on November 15, 2014. Several of the demonstrators were prosecuted in a high-profile trial last year.
Williams reacted to a newspaper report about how one of the graduates had written to Leo Varadkar to complain that the actions of Paul Murphy, the Solidarity TD who was involved in organising the protest, had ruined the ceremony.
Newstalk apologised to the complainant and accepted that presenter’s language had been inappropriate. It said that Williams had issued an on-air apology ten minutes later.
In response to the BAI, Newstalk maintained that the language used by Williams was not in breach of the BAI code. It claimed the language was justified for “editorial and creative reasons, being the well-known style of the presenter and the heated topic being discussed”.
It claimed that Williams’s comments had echoed the views of the graduate. Newstalk also argued the words used were “on the less coarse end of the scale” but conceded that they might have been offensive to some listeners.
The BAI said that while coarse and offensive language did not automatically breach its code, it found the tone and vitriol of the comments and the fact that they were largely directed at Mr Murphy and his supporters inappropriate and unjustifiable.
A second complaint that Williams’s remarks breached the BAI code in relation to fairness, objectivity and impartiality was also upheld. The BAI said Williams’s comments were “essentially a partisan diatribe” against a left-wing TD and his supporters “which the presenter clearly objects to on a personal level”.
The watchdog also upheld a complaint over comments made by Hook on his High Noon show on Newstalk on September 8, which attributed an element of blame to rape victims. The station apologised the following day, while the presenter made a further, more detailed apology during his next broadcast on September 11.
Hook was suspended on September 15 following an internal review. The station announced a week later that he was stepping down from the lunchtime slot but he returned to Newstalk at the start of the year with a new weekend show.
The BAI also upheld a complaint against an edition of RTÉ Radio 1’s Morning Ireland during which Audrey Carville, one of the presenters, described Kevin Myers, as “a Holocaust denier”.
Myers was dropped as a columnist by The Sunday Times last year over a column in which he suggested that two BBC presenters, Claudia Winkleman and Vanessa Feltz, negotiated better pay than their colleagues because they were Jewish. RTÉ argued that the programme had been quoting one of Myers’s own columns from the Irish Independent in 2009.
Upholding the complaint, the BAI said it was evident that Myers’s words did not amount to a statement denying the genocide of the Jewish people.
Liar Paul Williams Journalist Said Protesters Should Be Battered
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jF5GOi9q87g
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