Courtney McGrailMediawatch
“Technology has given bullies a much wider platform through online name-calling,” The Irish Times religious affairs correspondent Patsy McGarry reported Maynooth philosophy lecturer Fr Thomas Casey as having said at a conference on November 5 to mark the 40th anniversary of the Catholic Communications Office. (see page 7)
Fr Casey was far from the only speaker at the conference to make this point, according to Mr McGarry, with Archbishop Eamon Martin lamenting how more and more people with public profiles “have had to stop using social media as they have become victims of vitriol and abuse”.
Detraction
The sins of bearing false witness, defamation, detraction and calumny are no less grave just because they are committed behind the anonymity of a computer screen, Mr McGarry reported the Primate of All-Ireland as saying, with Msgr Paul Tighe, secretary to the Vatican’s Council for Social Communications, apparently observing that social media is a world where “turning the other cheek probably never found another context where it was more relevant”.
Sensible observations all, reported with an impressively straight face, given how Mr McGarry was infamously accused last year, by former Irish Catholic and Irish Times journalist John Waters, of using the anonymous Twitter account @Thomas2805607 to criticise and mock Mr Waters and journalists linked with The Iona Institute.
The apparently anonymous tweeter, Mr Waters claimed in Village, had “neglected to disable the GPS facility on his mobile device, which meant that, every time he tweeted, he revealed his precise location – sometimes his flat in southside Dublin, sometimes his local public house, and sometimes the offices of The Irish Times on Tara Street, Dublin”.
Mr Waters argued that the tweets, which he apparently referred to Irish Times editor Kevin O’Sullivan, “confirmed the existence of a highly toxic climate of illiberal antagonism towards particular viewpoints at the heart of the Irish Times’ editorial operation,” but when contacted by The Irish Catholic, Mr McGarry declined to comment.
It’s nice that Mr McGarry feels able to report on stories such as these without adding that he was once accused of engaging in anonymous social media attacks, but perhaps he thinks that Msgr Tighe is right in his observations about turning the other cheek.
Panti film flops
The so-called ‘Pantigate’ affair had been central to the tweets John Waters had attributed to Patsy McGarry, so it’s striking to see the Irish media fawning over The Queen of Ireland, a documentary about Rory O’Neill and his alter-ego Ms Panti Bliss.
Hailed by The Irish Times as “the most important social document of the century, so far”, the film raised €47,906 over its opening weekend.
Impressive figures, one might think, especially for a film shown across just 23 screens, but it’s worth contrasting them with the Irish-made film that holds the record for an opening weekend in Ireland. In June 2014, Mrs Brown’s Boys brought in €1.02 million over its first weekend.
It looks like Brendan O’Carroll, not Rory O’Neill, is queen of Ireland’s box office.
Ray D’Arcy’s boiling blood
As bizarre in its own way was Ray D’Arcy’s claim on Tuesday, November 3, that his “blood was boiling watching David Quinn” on the previous evening’s Clare Byrne Live. Sneering that The Irish Catholic columnist is good at “spitting out statistics”, he asserted that he typically goes unchallenged.
This would have been news to Mr Quinn, or indeed anyone familiar with the Irish media as a whole, but perhaps what Zig and Zag’s one-time straight man meant is that The Iona Institute’s director has a grasp of the facts that’s rarely bettered by the secular puppets who too often serve as talking heads in national discourse.