SO WHAT ABOUT THE MEDIA MOAN?... HE THINKS IT’S ALL OVER
IT WAS not Donald Trump but Neymar, the Brazilian soccer star famous for his on-pitch dramatics, who sprang to mind when Leo Varadkar met the press yesterday.
And after his outburst about the media at a New York gathering, the Taoiseach was doing his best to get back onside with the Leinster House journalists.
The Taoiseach seemed startled to be asked if he saw the Oireachtas press corps as sad, lazy and lying. ‘I don’t think I used any of those terms. I didn’t,’ pleaded the man who sympathised with Trump’s view of the media. And that is what the US president thinks.
Asked if he had a low opinion of reporters in general, the Taoiseach told the men and women of the press he meets regularly that such was not the case. Honest, ref.
But doesn’t he think they are gossipers? Only interested in triviality? Not the truth?
‘Yeah, look it, I said lots of positive things as well. And you know, they didn’t get reported, and as I said yesterday, in general I have a high regard for the media.’ Yet again giving the impression of a footballer collapsing in agony.
‘I certainly never made personal criticism of any individual, nor do I feel personally that I have been given unfair or a bad press, and I certainly absolutely regret if anything that I said came across as me being unsupportive of the media, or not being supportive of a free press, because that really isn’t the case.’ He was then asked about criticism of him by Micheál Martin yesterday, when the Fianna Fáil leader described him as a ‘prickly man with an authoritarian streak’.
‘Look I am not going to get involved in tit-for-tat personalised comments. I don’t think I have said one personalised negative thing about Micheál Martin or made a personalised remark about him.’
Mr Martin said Mr Varadkar had been ‘relentless in leaking information to journalists’, he was told, and he answered: ‘ Look it, it’s a free country and he is entitled to free speech. If he wants to make personalised attacks on me that is fine. I am not going to be engaging in titfor-tat. What I would say is that when it comes to President Trump I didn’t say I agreed with him on anything, whether it’s gender or race or abortion or migration or free trade or his views on the media.
‘I just said I had some sympathy with him and the fact that he’s willing to take on his critics where the rest of us, probably rightly, tend to take criticism on board or absorb it, or rise above it. But I certainly didn’t say that I agreed with him on his comments on the media.’
Becoming trivial, we asked the Taoiseach to tip us a World Cup winner and give us the reason why he thought so, as the tournament was of vital interest to large swathes of the population.
Dumbstruck again, he finally managed: ‘I have no idea. I have no idea.’
Another studs-up challenge was inevitable, with a follow-up about whether he would be shouting for England versus Sweden tomorrow – after wearing a Belgium scarf in Brussels last week.
There was a long pause. Then he joked: ‘I think I will avoid making any controversial remarks.’
My, how we laughed.