Monthly Archives: May 2012

Apparently so.

On Monday, May 16, the Irish Missionaries Union circulated its Strategic Plan 2011- 2014 to its members.

In it, the IMU said it was preparing for an RTE expose (Mission to Prey). It also said it planned to hold a workshop for members to deal with the expected fallout from the RTE show.

This was exactly a week before RTE Prime Time Investigates aired Mission to Prey, on Monday, May 23,

A day before the broadcast, on Sunday, May 22, the Sunday Business Post wrote a story about the document but added details of how Terry Prone (above), a director of The Communications Clinic – and the wife of RTE Board chairman Tom Savage (top), also a director of The Communications Clinic – was hired by the IMU in advance of the Mission to Prey broadcast.

The SBP article (behind paywall) said: “The body representing Irish Catholic missionary congregations is developing a strategy to prepare its members for an onslaught of allegations of sexual abuse. The Irish Missionary Union (IMU) is understood to have hired several public relations experts, including Terry Prone, to manage the fallout from an RTE Prime Time documentary, to be screened this week, about allegations of sexual abuse by Irish priests in Africa.”

On Monday, May 23, RTE broadcast Mission to Prey, despite offers by Fr Reynolds to take a paternity test to prove his innocence.

On September 22, 2011, the High Court heard how two paternity tests showed Fr Reynolds was not the father of the woman’s child, ultimately leading to Fr Reynold’s vindication.

On May 9, 2012, Tom Savage, told Newstalk he did not learn of the controversy surrounding the Mission To Prey programme until September 2011 – three months after Fr Reynolds started to take legal action and four months after his own PR firm was apparently employed to deal with the fall out from the show’s findings.

He said: “When we were told at our September board meeting. Because obviously if you are dealing with a huge organisation like RTE, with so much output in so many areas, the board is never informed on an ongoing basis of every single issue that crops up. And it tends to be that only when problems emerge and they’re either raised directly with the board or they’re raised through the Director General’s report that comes to us at the board meeting, the first item on the board meeting, that we have each month, we heard about it in September.”

Mr Savage also told an Oireachtas Committee meeting last week: “(The RTE board)  did not know until the evidence came that the first paternity test had shown that Fr Reynolds was not the parent. That was when we were informed. I was informed just in the lead-in to the September board meeting.”

(Laura Hutton and Leon Farrell/Photocall Ireland)

“We are all looking forward to a summer brimming with sports events from the European Championships to the London Olympics. Our hopes are high with anticipation and expectation and it is no wonder, given the talented, primed and professional athletes we are fortunate enough to have representing us.

We can learn some lessons from them. They have achieved excellence in the sporting field, not by virtue of luck or by accident, but because they are thorough in their planning, methodical in their preparations and they leave nothing to chance.

…Similarly, there is no shortcut to getting Ireland back on track. I hope that we in Government have tried to be frank and honest about that. There are plenty of opponents of the fiscal treaty who will claim that we can magic our problems away, but we cannot. We must continue in the quiet, determined way in which we have tackled this financial crisis since it began. We must work steadily and with determination towards Ireland’s recovery, and voting Yes to the treaty is an essential element of that.”

Lucinda Creighton: No Easy Solution To Ireland’s Woes But Yes Vote is Only Way To Go (Irish Times)

“In football, there is the following expression: he reads the game well. All good players read the game well. The same goes for rugby. Today, you will hear commentators say about Brian O’Driscoll that he reads the game.
This means that Drico can see where the game is going, where the next play is and how to either deal with it or seize the opportunity. In soccer, the player who reads the game knows where the ball is going next. They used to say this of Roy Keane. It is the same for all major sports.

Many years ago, I spent a summer working in Canada, where the national hero at the time was Wayne Gretzky, the brilliant ice hockey player. Gretzky was so good that, when he retired, his number – 99 – was retired from all North American professional hockey teams.

His most famous quote followed a simple question from a commentator about why he was so successful. Gretzky didn’t even think, he just responded as if it were the most simple thing in the world: “I skate to where the puck is going, not where it’s been.”

Our politicians and those who negotiate for us, whoever they are, would do well to listen to the sportsmen. Head to where the ball is going, not where it’s been.”

David McWilliams: The Game Is Only Beginning (DavidMcWilliams.ie)

Cartoon by Blower (Daily Telegraph)

Thanks Andrew Murphy