Gallagher defends Tweetgate remark
He compared RTÉ reaction to Church’s abuse stance
‘Just drawing an example’
THE ‘Tweetgate’ controversy that damaged Seán Gallagher’s hopes of winning the Presidency back in 2011 came back to haunt him yesterday.
The stumbling block to the businessman’s current presidential campaign arose after a 2012 video emerged in which he compared RTÉ’s handling of the tweet scandal to the Catholic Church’s cover-up of child sex abuse allegations.
In the video posted on social media in recent days, he refers to RTÉ’s response to the fallout from the Frontline debate as being ‘like how the Church itself as an institution reacted when it became aware of abuse and wrongdoing in the early 1990s’.
Yesterday, the former Dragons’ Den star defended his ‘analogy’ and then appeared to draw attention to the CervicalCheck scandal as another example of when institutions close ranks.
In the brief clip, Mr Gallagher said parallels were drawn between his case and the case of Fr Kevin Reynolds, who RTÉ had wrongly accused of fathering a child while a missionary in Africa in the 1980s.
Speaking in the 2012 clip, Mr Gallagher said: ‘But what I would say is that RTÉ, notwithstanding all of that, have some serious questions to answer. And I do equate it very similar, and it’s a parallel that has been made clear to me many times about it, with Fr Reynolds’s case and then my own case.
‘The similarities and parallels between what happened in RTÉ and their response to Fr Kevin Reynolds and to my unfairness, unfair treatment, is like how the Church itself as an institution reacted when it became aware of abuse and wrongdoing in the early 1990s. It went into defence mode, and the institution shut down to defend itself.’
When asked yesterday about how appropriate it was to compare the handling of his case by RTÉ to the handling of child sex abuse allegations by the Church, Mr Gallagher said the point he was making was in relation to individuals challenging institutions, and that he was just ‘drawing an example’ rather than making a comparison with specifics.
‘The point that I was making in that video is that very often, when an individual takes on an institution, the institutions do what the institutions do,’ he said. ‘They lock down to protect the institution, rather than deal with the issue, and sometimes the walls and the blockades that they put up compound the first challenging problem, rather than deal with it. So I was just drawing an example... That’s the analogy I was making.’
Mr Gallagher said it was not his intention to put the victims of clerical sex abuse in the same category as himself, regarding his own difficulties in relation to Tweetgate. He added that if he was making that reference today he might make it with the regard to the HSE and ‘some of those victims that we know now in terms of the challenges that patients have had by not having access to their records, and having to fight for that access against an institution’.
Asked if he was saying some of the issues pertaining to the CervicalCheck scandal were on par with his issues with RTÉ, he said he was ‘just trying to make an analogy’ of where an individual takes on an institution. He was speaking at St Patrick’s College in Drumcondra on his election campaign tour.
Comment – Page 12 emmajane.hade@dailymail.ie