At Trinity College this week; editor of University Times Eleanor O’Mahony

This week a petition was launched at Trinity College Dublin, calling for the removal of The University Times‘ editor’s salary and their on-campus accommodation from 2020/2021.

The newspaper has claimed that the petition, if successful, would also see the paper get just €3,000 a year to go towards publishing in print – and this would cover just one issue.

It follows the newspaper placing a recording a device outside an on-campus apartment where an initiation ceremony took place of an “elite, invite-only Trinity sporting society”, called the Knights of the Campanile.

On Monday, The University Times‘ rival newspaper Trinity News published an editorial titled: ‘Bugging has destroyed the integrity of the University Times’, in which it said:

“UT have claimed that RTÉ and The Irish Times have used the same methods of source-gathering in the past, but this is not true. Those organisations have never bugged anyone’s home.

“Another crucial difference is that their biggest intrusions were overwhelmingly in the public interest – which is the test applied by courts when trying to establish whether this kind of reporting is legal – as when an RTÉ researcher posed as an employee of Áras Attracta to expose abuse against residents there.

“Whatever you think about The Knights of the Campanile’s “hazing”, it is in no way comparable to such abuses.

“UT’s behaviour is better compared to the News International phone-hacking scandal in the UK in 2011, in which News of the World bugged many high-profile people in British society, including Gordon Brown and the Royal Family. The scandal was so great that it led to the closure of News of the World.”

Further to this…

Eleanor O’Mahony, editor of The University Times, told The Times Ireland edition today:

“The reaction from the Knights of the Campanile has been predictable, but we are more concerned by the response from our fellow journalists in Trinity News, who have essentially called for us to be defunded.

“We stand by our story and the techniques used to report it. We will resist any effort to defund the paper or to chill our future reporting.”

Trinity paper accused of bugging student in ‘hazing’ investigation (The Times Ireland edition)

Previously: Best Haze Of Our Lives

Pics: Jacob

H/T: Christine Bohan