He agreed pretty quickly that the article was inaccurate and indefensible. So instead of hiring a lawyer and suing the Sunday Times, I talked to the paper's Irish editor. If you benefit from those freedoms in the extraordinary and highly privileged way that newspaper columnists do, you have to be very, very careful about the way you conduct yourself. I’m given those freedoms because there is a working assumption that free and open and robust debate is not just permissible in, but essential to, a democracy. I’m allowed to enrage some of those people and (though I don’t set out to do so) to upset others. I’m allowed to be robustly critical of all sorts of people. I’m allowed to take part in what we might call the semi-official national discourse. I occupy a position of enormous privilege. Even the most aggressive lawyer would tell them to stuff my mouth with gold and make the whole thing go away fast.Īnd then I remembered something. The Sunday Times couldn't possibly go into court to defend an article that was so sloppily written and badly researched. The "profile" was, in other words, a gold mine. The BMW story was pure invention and almost every “fact” that followed was wildly and demonstrably wrong. I went home that day, as I usually do, on the number 13 bus. I don’t own a car because, to my shame, I can’t drive. The article continued as it began, painting me as a hypocrite, a liar and a lazy dilettante who was paid a massive salary in return for very little work. The implication was pretty clear: I was a hypocritical, champagne socialist, stirring up the masses from a position of wealth and privilege. It began with a description of me driving home from that rally in my series 5 BMW. The following weekend, the Irish edition of the Sunday Times carried a long, anonymous "profile" of me. In December 2010, I acted as MC for an Irish Congress of Trade Unions rally against the bank bailout and the arrival of the troika.
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