Former Taoiseach, Garret FitzGerald, as part of one of his weekly Irish Times columns (’Interaction between print and electronic media seems limited‘) wrote about the courage of journalists covering paramilitary activities in Ireland not being backed at editorial level:

OVER THE past three decades I was constantly struck by the
extraordinary courage that so many journalists, Irish, British and
foreign, showed in covering paramilitary activities in Northern
Ireland. Yet this courage does not seem to me to have been always
matched at editorial level.

A response from former Irish Times editor Conor Brady was published in the letters section today (orange colour added to text by Blurred Keys):

Madam, - Garret FitzGerald (Opinion & Analysis, April 12th)
writes of the courage of the many journalists who covered
paramilitary activities in Northern Ireland over the past three
decades. Yet this courage, he adds, did not always seem to him to
have been matched at editorial level.

He cites Gerry Adams’s denial (in an RTÉ interview with
Brian Farrell) that he was a member of the IRA. "Thereafter, all
the rest of the media seemed to feel it necessary to accept Adams’s
denial". Did editors really need to worry "quite so much about
being sued for libel by paramilitaries"?, he asks.

Garret was a weekly columnist at
The Irish Timesfor 16
years under my editorship. I cannot remember the newspaper’s
failure to pin down Gerry Adams’s alleged membership of the IRA as
a recurring theme in our conversations or, indeed, in his own
copy.

What I do remember over my years as editor (and while working
under my predecessor editors, Douglas Gageby and Fergus Pyle) are
innumerable editorials in which
The Irish Timesmade it
clear that it recognised no distinction between Sinn Féin and
the IRA, that it understood Sinn Féin to be subservient to the
IRA’s "Army Council" and that it believed the leadership of both
organisations to be interchangeable.

Newspaper editors can have an irritating habit of asking for
some corroborative evidence before allowing serious claims to be
published in their news columns, as distinct from opinion
sections.

I worked with a succession of excellent (and, as Garret says,
courageous) Northern editors and reporters on the ground in
Belfast. Had any of them been able to furnish such evidence to me
they would have, rightly, expected the newspaper to publish it and
it would have done so.

But perhaps more tellingly than any of the foregoing, I cannot
remember any charges of membership of the IRA being laid against Mr
Adams - much less his conviction - during the years when Garret was
in government as Taoiseach, with the full resources of the State’s
security and intelligence services at his hand.

It is extraordinary that he would expect the newspapers to have
asserted (without evidence) what the State, of which he was
Taoiseach, would not. - Yours, etc,

CONOR BRADY, (Editor, The Irish
Times, 1986-2002), Monkstown, Co Dublin.

FitzGerald also wrote:

A quite separate, but also relevant, issue is what seems to me
to be a curious lack of interaction between the print and
electronic media when investigative stories break in one or other
of these two types of media outlet.

As someone who from an early age has followed news stories
closely, I have frequently been struck by the way in which the
electronic media often seem reluctant to publicise stories that
break in the print media - and equally by what seems in many cases
to be a corresponding unwillingness on the part of the print media
to follow up major stories that break on radio or, more commonly,
on TV.

I don’t think I am imagining that this kind of stand-off
sometimes arises between the two arms of our media, and an example
of this seems to me to have arisen a week ago.

Two weeks ago TV3 concluded its excellent series of programmes
on the work of the Criminal Assets Bureau (Cab) with a powerful
documentary on the hundreds of millions of pounds or euro raised by
three decades of IRA criminal activities.

Much of that huge amount of illegal money was used to finance
the IRA’s extensive murder campaign of violence, but Cab clearly
believes that a significant proportion, skilfully laundered, was
held back to be invested in property and other business activities
to the benefit of Sinn Féin.

As a result, that party now seems to have a major financial
advantage vis-a-vis the constitutional parties in both parts of the
island - although it is only in Northern Ireland that it has been
able to translate this advantage into a significant share of the
popular vote.

This TV series had the kind of assistance from Cab and from
former police leaders both here and in the North that enabled its
authors to produce an authoritative account of what has been a huge
criminal conspiracy.

I was glad to note that there were clear indications in this
programme that Cab is confident that years of painstaking
investigations on its part are likely to enable it to mount a
successful prosecution against those who currently control the
assets into which the profits of decades of IRA criminal activity
have been converted.

Some observers had come to believe that, either because of
inadequate evidence or because of political pressure not to rock
the boat of the Northern Ireland settlement, this IRA funds scandal
had been or was being allowed to become a dead issue - a belief
that I had not shared.

I was particularly struck by several features of this particular
programme.

One was the extent of the interaction between the IRA and
non-political criminal gangs in our State.

It is clear that many proceeds of non-political crime were
laundered at a foreign exchange bureau that was operated at the
Border on behalf of the IRA. These gangs and non-political Border
smugglers had been required to pay a share of their loot to the
IRA.

Although word of a police raid on that bureau seems to have
leaked, enabling its organisers to remove relevant documentation,
these records were happily found in a nearby car, and have since
revealed that this tiny office had been handling something like
£100 million a year.

However, because Cab feared that the manager of this bureau
would be murdered by the IRA if he disclosed information on those
who had used him to launder money, they did not press him on this
issue - and he settled for a four-year sentence for his financial
activities.

What I find surprising, then, is that the issues raised by this
remarkable programme do not seem to have evoked reactions from our
print media.

Is this perhaps a reflection of some kind of jealousy between
the two arms of the media?

Whether or not that is the explanation, such a stand-off does
not serve the public interest.

The answer simply is that the TV3 programme, Paul Williams’ Dirty Money: The Story of the Criminal Assets Bureau, was a largely a rehash of old stories or unused content from William’s work in the Sunday World.

Strangely - or maybe not - FitzGerald fails to mention Williams or his newspaper. Is he a closet fan of the Sunday World?