RTE acted shamefully towards Fr Reynolds
Having disgracefully defamed an innocent man, it then could not even apologise properly, writes Eilis O'Hanlon
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The apology to Fr Kevin Reynolds which was read out between the Nine O'Clock News and Prime Time last Thursday was a blink and miss it affair, which scarcely scratched the surface of the dreadful wrong which RTE had done to this man.
All journalists make mistakes. None of us has an unblemished record. But even by the standards of media legal cases, what was said about Fr Reynolds in A Mission To Prey last May was staggering stuff, as it was put directly to him that he had sexually abused a teenage girl whilst a missionary in Africa in 1982, that the victim had fallen pregnant and that he had subsequently abandoned victim and child alike.
Fr Reynolds denied the allegations with every ounce of strength and outrage that he could muster, but RTE ignored all the warnings and went ahead with the broadcast anyway. Even when he offered to take a blood test to prove that he could not be the father of this child (the test was subsequently taken and cleared his name), RTE continued to stand by its story on public-interest grounds and actually claimed to have third-party proof.
Aoife Kavanagh, who made the programme, was an experienced foreign correspondent -- albeit one whose skills as an investigative reporter were clearly not up to the challenges involved in this case -- but she was not alone in making mistakes. Some of the most senior behind-the-scenes people in RTE's current affairs department were involved, to varying degrees, in the decisions which led to the programme appearing in its offending form.
Legal warnings were also reportedly ignored. As last week's judgement said, they had choices at every stage along the way and consist-ently made the wrong ones before a hurt and angry Fr Reynolds forced them to stop.
Sometimes there is simply no way to make proper amends, especially when so many people will always say there's no smoke without fire and particularly when priests are involved. That much is evident in the internet chat rooms, where there's still a palpable hostility to any member of the clergy being granted sympathy, even when he is entirely innocent.
Many said openly that even if Fr Reynolds didn't harm children whilst he was a missionary, many other Catholic priests did and therefore, as a member of the same church, he had no right to complain because he shares the collective guilt.
It's mad stuff but this is the often rabidly anti-clerical climate into which RTE chose to drop Fr Reynolds and which made his subsequent anguish so intense. All the more reason then for RTE to ensure, in the wake of this settlement, that there could not be a single person in the country who was left in any doubt that Fr Reynolds was an innocent man and that they had trampled on every strand of decency and fairness in accusing him of such serious offences without foundation.
They needed to say it loud, they needed to say it prominently and they needed to say it repeatedly for the benefit of those who might have missed it first, second and third time round.
They didn't. The settlement was mentioned third in the main headlines on that evening's Six One News but the story itself wasn't covered until nearly 20 minutes into the programme. When it came, it was dealt with in an item that lasted only two minutes, and the apology was not read out. When they came back after the break, the apology had been dropped from the list of main headlines.
There soon followed a report on the Irish football fan who sneaked into the play-off in Tallinn by wearing an Estonian tracksuit, which, incredibly, was almost exactly the same length, give or take a few seconds, as the one they had devoted to their attack on Fr Reynolds.
The apology was finally read out only after the Nine O'Clock News, quickly, in a monotone, with no emotion whatsoever, as if it was an announcement of minor delays on the Dart. Many viewers found the tone woefully inadequate to the offence.
This was happening at 9.30 on a Thursday evening, just before an edition of Prime Time devoted to plans for public sector reform which only political anoraks would have turned on to watch. It could not have been given less prominence had it been read out in Latin.
The apology was repeated on Morning Ireland and was ordered to be reprinted in three national newspapers as well as the Connacht Tribune, but overall there was an element of rushing past it as if it was the scene of an accident which it was painful to look upon. Only Mary Wilson's Drivetime covered the story with any depth or effectiveness. By Friday, the story was buried away on the website.
It was hard to escape the conclusion that even now, RTE still don't get it. That they don't know what it means to falsely accuse a man in full glare of the whole country of being a child abuser, a rapist, a liar and a hypocrite.
In his remarks, Mr Justice De Valera said he hoped that RTE would learn valuable lessons from the affair, but it wasn't looking promising in the immediate aftermath. The original story received huge amounts of attention in the Irish media following its broadcast. The apology felt like a perfunctory coda to the saga, a begrudging climbdown through gritted teeth from an organisational culture where the creed that all priests are fair game is deeply ingrained.
Fr Reynolds is fortunate that paternity tests cannot be so easily dismissed as other facts or RTE might even now be holed up in its bunker, holding out against the truth.
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