There was an unfortunately characteristically peevish tone to the Tánaiste's complaints about the Ditch website regarding it not being an 'independent news platform'. That may well be true, or it may not, but the record with regard to resignations from Minister's is impressive. And here the Tánaiste is on shaky ground. Is he saying that the resignations were wrong simply because he doesn't like the outlet? There are other questions too. Why have other outlets not engaged in the sort of forensic research that the Ditch appears to conduct? Again, these aren't trivial issues that result in resignations.
As was put in comments by SonofStan, in some ways one does have the feeling that the current parties occupying the government benches are unused to not seeing a certain sort of opposition on the opposite side. Now this isn't about the nonsense of a kinder gentler Dáil of yore. For one reason and another I had the sometimes interesting, sometimes not, experience of watching Dáil debates from the early/mid 2000s onwards for many years. The pretence that there was no conflict is an absolute nonsense. Indeed the visceral detestation of each other by Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil while now seemingly largely a thing of the past was quite real then. Sure, politically and ideologically the distinctions might appear to be largely minimal but when did that stop parties occupying the same political space from falling out? And consider the antipathy towards Haughey, and the response to that antipathy, or to Ahern come to think of it. Disdain on one side, contempt on the other, and who could tell which matched with which side.
So no, the idea that things were more polite is a fiction that is put around by those who have sought to portray Sinn Féin as something alien and novel and not in a good way. That the two parties of government have been forced into a marriage of convenience and that they have more emollient figures (up to a point) leading them takes some heat out of the equation between them. But one wonders were they each holding fifteen per cent more support would they appear quite so congenial?
So the Ditch is an unwelcome surprise one suspects, and rightly the NUJ pushed back hard against the statements made in the Dáil by the Tánaiste. He might not like the Ditch. Many indeed probably don't. But dark mutterings about the provenance of that outfit don't really substitute for what has been discovered by it. And another thought. No one, surely, in this day and age is truly unsceptical about any media platform. So again it's not the platform but the impact that will land with people. Or perhaps that is precisely what the Tánaiste is concerned about.
And that brings one to another thought. I wonder how many people before this last week knew much about The Ditch. I've looked at the site a number of times but not a huge number. And I'm politically involved. I'd guess that most people haven't bothered to do so. But the Tánaiste's focus on the site is like an advertising campaign, for it. You can bet there'll be more people following it from here on out.
Unintended consequence? Well yes, exactly that. Perhaps the idea was to delegitimise it and fast. But when you've got the NUJ, the Sunday Independent editorial, and now the Press Ombudsman amongst others pushing back against the criticism of The Ditch, you got to wonder was that the best approach by the Government?
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