Sam: The short-lived conspiracy of silence around the Niall Collins story

It’s really hard to organise a conspiracy.

Especially if you’re trying to organise a conspiracy of silence involving dozens of journalists across competing news organisations, and politicians across competing political parties.

After all, these are two professions that tend to attract people with a fondness for the spotlight, and, often, for the cut and thrust of public debate. It’s hard to shut them up.

Yet, for some reason, for days after The Ditch on 19 April published a story about a council land deal in Limerick and Fianna Fáil junior minister Niall Collins, there was a strange silence.

It made people wonder why. And as the hours turned into days, and the days passed one after another, with nearly no follow-up or comment, and no explanation as to why – it made some people very suspicious.

If you live half your life on Twitter, as I do (embarrassingly), then you might have seen the people living in the replies of political correspondents persistently asking why they weren’t reporting on the Niall Collins story.

It reminded me of the paperboy following John Cusack around in the 1985 film Better Off Dead, shouting “I want my two dollars!”

Some of these questioners clearly believed there were journalists who were choosing not to cover the story – or were being told by their bosses not to cover it – because of personal or political allegiances.

I’ve seen no evidence of this. But even if it were true of a couple journalists, they’d surely be outnumbered by others without such constraints, who are always hungry for a good story – about anyone.

Still, though, days passed. No comment from Collins, or his party colleagues or from other parties in government, or from opposition politicians. Nearly no follow-up from other news organisations, or explanations about why they hadn’t followed up yet.

The Echo Chamber Podcast interviewed the team from The Ditch about their story. Then, for days, crickets.

On Monday, the dam finally broke, six days after The Ditch’s story – a lifetime in the news business, a millennium in Twitter years.

Trinity News published an article saying documents they’d seen supported The Ditch’s story. People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy wrote to the Ceann Comhairle and the Dáil’s Business Committee to seek time for questions to Collins this week.

Then Collins finally made a statement on the story himself. And suddenly everyone was talking about it. Back to normal.

So why the lull? It was weird wasn’t it?

Not My Job

Over the last couple of days I collected the public and private views of about a dozen journalists at national media on this question.

Everyone had their own take, but some themes emerged – which felt pretty familiar to me. I mean, I didn’t follow up The Ditch’s story either.

When I was asking on Twitter why no one was following up the story, someone asked me why I hadn’t done it myself. Fair question, and maybe if I answer it here at some length that will shed some light on why others didn’t either.

Basically, it’s not my beat.

I write for the Dublin Inquirer. We cover the Dublin City Council area, and I focus, generally, on transport, energy and the environment. This was a story about a TD from Limerick and a land deal there.

We’re a tiny team, so we have to stay focused on our area and our beats. If we randomly wrote about every shiny thing that caught our eye around the world, we wouldn’t be able to bring the consistency and depth of coverage that we think people want.

Even if I put all that aside, if I wanted to cover the story – to examine it to see if what The Ditch wrote was correct and then keep digging to find something new to move the story forward – I don’t have the right knowledge, sources and relationships.

I wouldn’t know where to find Collins in person and there’s probably no way he’d answer if I rang him. Same goes for basically any other TD. They don’t know me.

Furthermore, I don’t know anything about the people, geography or organisations involved in the land deal in Limerick that the story revolves around.

Even if I put that all aside too and decided the story was important or interesting enough to jump off my beat and into uncharted territory in the wilds of Leinster House and Limerick for, there’s the timing issue.

I thought about working on a story, but assumed that by the time I started figuring it all out, the people whose beat the story actually fell neatly into would have already published their follow-ups, and I would have wasted my time.

Let’s say most journalists in the country were in a similar situation to me. Following-up the Niall Collins story just wasn’t our job, so we were sitting there waiting for the people who knew the beat and had the sources to write the follow-ups.

Obviously they had their own stories they were already working on, and there’s only so much a person can do in a day, so it would take a bit for them to find some time to fit this into their schedule.

But the days just kept passing and there was only silence from them. Why?

News Judgment

Not everyone thought it was worth following up.

There’s a lot happening in the world, and journalists, like everyone else, have different ideas about what is important – and what they are interested in.

So even people covering the same beat will disagree about whether something that happened on it is worth writing about.

There was, it seemed, a huge amount of interest in the story in my virtual world on Twitter.

So much, in fact, that when someone asked me whether all that interest was real, I thought it was worth checking out.

I used an online tool that visualises the spread of information on Twitter, and evaluates how much bot activity it involves.

It didn’t look to me like there was anything fishy going on with the Niall Collins story, but doing this kind of analysis isn’t something I know anything about.

I checked in with a pro, too, who has access to the proper tools. After having a quick look at the issue, she said she didn’t see anything strange going on either.

Another sign that there was genuine interest in the story among a lot of real humans is that after days of silence, when the Trinity News published their Niall Collins story, it got so much traffic their site apparently couldn’t handle it all.

For a while I was getting an error that said “Resource limit reached”.

So let’s say it’s a story worth covering, which a lot of people were interested in. Then we’re back to the same question again: why so little comment or coverage?

The Fucking Ditch

The Ditch has broken some monster stories since it launched in 2021.

Their work pushed Fine Gael junior minister Damien English to resign. It pushed An Bord Pleanála deputy chair Paul Hyde to resign and appear in court.

I am sure a lot of journalists who’ve been in the job for a lot longer and haven’t had a chance to influence national politics in these ways are jealous.

I’ll certainly admit that I wish it was me who broke those stories about Paul Hyde and An Bord Pleanála, not them.

Now here they come again with another big story. And people are asking why long-established journalists at eminent news organisations aren’t following up.

I think it’s safe to say that almost everyone wants to be the star. It’s much less attractive to be among the chorus, adding impact to the star’s performance.

Especially when you really don’t like the star.

While The Ditch have broken some huge stories, they have not made a lot of friends in the media along the way.

Aside from making the rest of us look a bit smaller by breaking big stories, they have a pugilistic style that puts some people off. I could go on for a good while about people’s gripes about The Ditch.

For me, though, the main thing is, it has been the case in the past that other journalists examined The Ditch’s work, and it stood up to scrutiny, to the full glare of the national spotlight and examination by a national audience.

So, regardless of whether people are jealous, or whether The Ditch are cuddly and likeable, I thought they’d earned enough credibility that other journalists would follow-up on their latest Niall Collins story.

And some did. They got right to work following it up. It’s just that journalism is hard, it takes time, and there are legal risks.

Process and Legal Risks

If this story had been on my beat, and I’d believed it was worth covering, and hadn’t let my feelings about The Ditch put me off, I would have wanted to start from scratch.

This is obviously the kind of story I could be sued for defamation over, and so could my employer. And, whether I was right or wrong, I’d have to defend that suit.

That would mean huge amounts of stress, probably tens of thousands of euro in legal fees – and potentially public humiliation, the loss of my job and the loss of any financial assets I might have.

This means that the bar is much much higher for whether I think this is a story I want to be spending my time on. Even if I decided it was, I’d be very cautious.

I absolutely would not want to rely on other journalists’ work. I’d want to reconstruct the pieces of The Ditch’s story on my own, and then, from that foundation, have a think about what I could write about the issue.

A roadblock for other journalists, apparently, was that Limerick County Council wasn’t releasing the documents to them that it had to The Ditch.

“It is close to standard practice that FOIs of a non personal nature are considered in the public domain once initially released. Most bodies keep a log of them which can be asked for with no wait time. It is inexplicable that the local authority won’t release them,” Irish Examiner journalist Cianan Brennan said on Twitter Monday.

Virgin Media News political correspondent Gavan Reilly explained the roadblock as he saw it on Twitter on Monday too.

What finally broke the stalemate?

TD Paul Murphy’s call for the issue to be discussed in the Dáil. Then there was something to write about, even for journalists who weren’t ready yet to get into the details of the story.

A big question I still have is why it was Murphy, and not the leader of another party who made this move. Why didn’t Sinn Féin or the Social Democrats or Labour, for example, demand an investigation first?

But this definitely is not on my beat. My only thought is that maybe Sinn Féin didn’t want to go hard at a Fianna Fáil TD over this when they might need to go into coalition with his party after the next election to form a government.

I’ll have to wait for political correspondents to ask around behind the scenes at Leinster House, for off-the-record whisperings of the motives of the different parties – and their analysis of what strategies might have been at work.

More Transparency

Another question I haven’t been able to find a satisfactory answer to is this:

When they were being plagued by people in their Twitter mentions asking why they weren’t covering the Niall Collins story, why didn’t journalists just explain?

Why didn’t they say, “It’s not on my beat.”

Or “Fuck The Ditch.”

Or “I don’t think it’s a story.”

Or, “I’m working on it but it’s going to take some time, just be a bit patient.”

Or, “Limerick County Council isn’t releasing the documents I need.”

Or, “It’s too risky, and not a big enough deal, I don’t want to risk losing my career and my house over it.”

A little transparency, I think, would have made the lull look less weird, made people less suspicious – and perhaps avoided some erosion of trust in journalism in Ireland.

Of course, it might also be that the people who thought this lull was a sign of some nefarious business behind the scenes would still have thought that anyway.