Gavan Reilly: Anatomy of silence: why we couldn’t talk about Collins

Suffice to say, it’s been an interesting few days. Let’s start at the very beginning.

I was driving to Belfast last Wednesday – for the final day of the big Good Friday Agreement commemorations – when I got a text from someone involved in the news website The Ditch. I half-knew the sender from previous interactions where we’d ended up discussing some of the nuances of their reporting. Having been the ones to end the ministerial careers of Robert Troy and Damien English, their stuff is always well researched and worthy of attention.

The message was a heads-up about an article coming later that day. The junior minister Niall Collins had participated in county council business in 2007 at a time when the council sold off public land, which ended up being bought by Collins’ own wife. If this amounted to a legally prohibited conflict of interest, there could be jail time.

Right, I said to myself, as Apple CarPlay read me the message somewhere around Castleblayney. That’s something to look out for later. In truth, though, the distractions of the day job kept the curiosity at bay. There was Ursula von der Leyen, and Charles Michel, and Bill Clinton, and Leo Varadkar, and Rishi Sunak all to be listened to for the afternoon, and a cameraman to work alongside, and my part of a podcast to record, and a news bulletin to fill, and a phone with a battery that gave way before the day’s work was done. I was late getting home.

So when the dust settles and you get a chance to properly read and dwell on the story, your journalist brain kicks in: where has this come from? How do I stand this up for myself? How do I move this on? And that’s where the trouble starts. The article says it would be illegal to participate in a vote in which he, or a connected party, had a clear financial interest. But, in this instance, did he actually have one? Yes, his wife had inquired about buying the land but could you conclusively say she materially benefited from a decision simply to put the land on the market? And was that decision the final word? Would there have been another vote to approve the final transaction, later down the line? Is that the one where conflicts of interest come in? Are the minutes available somewhere?

And will Niall Collins talk? Apparently not. There had been no comment to any other outlet by Friday and when I asked my radio producer to approach him about coming on Newstalk on Sunday, there was no reply. Nor was there any luck in tracking down the minutes: the old county council’s website had not been archived in any corner of the internet, and the new combined council didn’t have them readily to hand.

So what do you do in the meantime? Can you stand up the story for yourself? Not without firsthand access to the documents. Can you say for certain that it’s not defamatory? Not for certain – not to the degree that you’d be comfortable repeating on the TV news. But, can you definitively deconstruct it, or point to a material failing in it? No - the authors have documents you don’t, and are prepared to cite them. And don’t forget: this is an outlet that does its homework, and has the scalps to prove it.

So, what can you do in the meantime? Actually, not very much. Publicly picking holes in the story could easily be an unfair smear on the professional reputation of people who have earned their stripes. But repeating the story as gospel, with no firsthand proof of your own, means you may be baselessly accusing a man of an offence he didn’t commit. And all parties involved are still entitled to their good name. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Ironically, under Irish law, if you think something might be defamatory, you can’t even point people in its direction without compounding the problem. So imagine if the Meath Chronicle went rogue and published a piece accusing its Leinster House columnist of animal cruelty. You’d struggle to find the evidence, because there isn’t any: I haven’t had a pet since I was three. You, as a reader, might feel entitled to take the piece at face value but another news outlet, without any evidence of me kicking a cat or starving a dog, can’t simply repeat it as gospel because they’d be repeating a defamation. I could sue not just the Chronicle for its wrongful reporting, but I could sue any other news outlet that carried it as fact.

So you’re goosed. You’re lodged in a stalemate where even acknowledging the story, let alone repeating it, is a legal tightrope. Collins knew it, which is probably why he didn’t address any media queries - any comment would be reportable and justify further ventilation of the story. And all the while, your Twitter mentions are bombarded by people who gave due credence to the original story and who wonder if there’s some kind of conspiracy to suppress a controversy and protect a politically indispensable minister of state (no, really).

Only the veil of parliamentary privilege might give us some ability to repeat the actual allegations - would a TD try to raise it in the chamber? As it happened, yes: Paul Murphy confirmed to Virgin Media News that he was going to seek Dáil time for an address from Collins. We could at least report that… and lo and behold, given the story a public platform then prompted Collins to issue an on-the-record statement a few hours later.

And from there, game on.