Showing posts with label Ciaran Barnes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ciaran Barnes. Show all posts
Back in March a person describing themselves as ‘a former director of publicity for Sinn Fein’ filed a report to someone in London. It seems the writer unilaterally took it upon himself to function as the NUJ Ethics Council’s Belfast agent, tasked with filing reports to London. I cannot say for certain that his letter was merely the latest in a line of reports to people in the British capital, although the balance of probability would tend towards the writer having previous form.
Perhaps it is just my imagination but am I wrong to sniff the scent of collusion between the actions of the NUJ chapel at the Irish News who tattled to Dear Sarah, and the ‘former director of publicity for Sinn Fein’ who also went a-squealing to her? Both letters were written on the same day; the former publicity director's in the morning followed by the chapel's a few hours later. Both were eager to point out to Sarah how I had said ghastly things about either her or the Ethics Council. And both praised the same council for having taken action against me. Coordination, collaboration, or coincidence?
The ‘former director of publicity for Sinn Fein’ has his own website where he maintains a diary of things he did on a lot of his days. He appears to leave out the days that he is reporting to London. We know he reports because we have caught him — but he never writes about it on his website. A reader would never know that the NUJ’s self-appointed Belfast agent might have a penchant for reporting to London. He doesn’t record that type of thing. On the 29th of March this year, although he was with practiced hand scribbling a report to London, he failed to disclose it to his readers. Anyone taking a look at his website for that date will find no entry in it; he didn’t write, ‘Today I reported to someone in London about Mackers.’
If readers don’t take my word for it, they can view a copy of the letter he hoped would secretly fortify the case against me so as to hobble my appeal. Fortunately, the Ethics Council was in no position to stand over that secrecy so it provided me with a copy of his letter. Even it has not yet signed up to the secret evidence clause of the British courts; but for that I would not be able to share it with the readers. And share it I shall. If anyone thinks they are going to submit secret evidence against me in the hope of producing a Diplock type verdict, and expect me to share the secret, then I am going to disappoint them. So here you go.
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| Click Image to Enlarge & Read |
Now, think what we will about the chapel in the Irish News, it can plausibly claim to at least have a dog in the fight. They decided to stick by one of their own. I don’t think it made the right call and feel its behaviour was far from salutary and detrimental to journalism, but c’est la vie. But what was the Belfast agent’s agenda?
In my view, he was hoping that he could erode the credibility of the defence being mounted against the PSNI raid on the Boston College archive. He did so in private because he didn’t want the public to know, otherwise he would have recorded it on his web diary as he does for many of his other activities. I think he does a lot of things in private that he does not want you to know about. He tried shutting Richard O’Rawe up over another sordid action of his, and about which he wanted nothing in the public domain. He failed then as well, just as he has failed here.
Ultimately, in my view we are drawing inexorably closer to the truth about the instigation of the NUJ case against me.
One of the journalists who took the complaint called for the Boston College material to be handed over to British authorities. He too thought he could operate in secret but it was his misfortune to get caught out.
What we can establish is this: two of the people involved in lobbying the NUJ to sanction me, at a time when I was fighting a source protection case backed by the NUJ leadership, were working in clandestine fashion to compromise the vital confidentiality of the archive.
Now as these strands all weave closer together a picture is emerging to suggest that there is something rotten in the state of Danmark. We are on the trail of something sordid. When we find it, as we will because we are good at this sort of thing — 55 Hours and all that — we will share it with you; just as we shared the Belfast agent’s secret report to London with you.
Watch this space.
Clifford Peeples is not exactly the sort of person who would be high up on most peoples’ list of possible dinner guests. There doesn’t seem to have been a brand of violent Loyalism that he has not been involved with, no outer limit of wacky, ultra-Protestant evangelism that he has not crossed. And then there were those pipe bomb attacks in the late 1990’s for which he was given a ten-year jail term.
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| Clifford Peeples, on the right, leaves Long Kesh with Pastor Kenny McClinton |
I would not have a problem entertaining him myself but others would. I have spent much of my professional life breaking bread or ingesting stronger substances with greater and more mendacious blackguards than he, and while I have never met Mr Peeples, he strikes me from a distance as an honest type. Loopy almost surely, but probably sincere. Others I have entertained did or ordered worse than he and happily admitted so in my presence but now pretend it never happened. So, who is worse, who is worthy of more respect?
Anyway, these days Peeples wears a different hat, or rather has another hat to wear alongside the others hanging in his wardrobe. I don’t know what he does politically or whether he still preaches in a tin hut somewhere in the desolate wastes of north or east Belfast but currently he also practises as a freelance photographer.
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Purists in my profession would cavil at the notion of a political activist doubling as a journalist but personally I don’t have a problem with it at all. Politics and journalism go together like fish and chips and while I do try to separate my own views from my reporting, I understand it in others – as long as they are upfront and straight about it. In practice I have found the reporters most po-faced on the issue to be the most hypocritical.
What I do mind however is when journalists allow their political differences, or personal animosities fueled by political differences, to spill out in public shows of malevolence and threats of violence, especially when the effect is to stop or obstruct a journalist doing his or her job.
According to Clifford Peeples this is what happened to him in the centre of Belfast last Friday night during Loyalist demonstrations in Royal Avenue against an anti-internment rally being staged by republican dissidents. Eye-witnesses apparently support his story.
Peeples was on assignment for a website called ‘Ulster News’ which seems to be relatively new addition to the internet, given that the only story running on it is about his experience last Friday evening. He was, he says, busy taking photographs of the developing riot when he was verbally assaulted by a fellow journalist and so violent was the onslaught that a policeman on riot duty had to leave the lines to intervene. I don’t know what the source of the anger towards Peeples was, but the chances are that it has its origins in his political activity.
This is how he described the attack:
Screaming that I was a “dirty fat bastard” and continuing with threats of “I’m going to fix you, you Fucking Fat, Fucking Cunt”. This continued as I tried to report on what was taking place. Police officers were being injured and a full riot was now about to engulf Royal Avenue…….I told him to stop screaming obscenities and if he wanted he could talk to me later round the corner. He continued on his obscenity fueled diatribe, making more threats of physical violence towards me. Something that was of concern to those standing around him. One woman was telling him to, “stop behaving like some mad man on drugs”. His disgraceful barrage became too much for one riot control officer, who broke away from keeping public order and publicly reprimanded him, telling him he would be arrested if he were to continue. The officer came to me and told me that he had warned him about his behaviour and that I should stay away from him. The officer then reengaged with the riot control team.
So who was the journalist allegedly attacking Peeples? Turns out, in the account of Peeples, it was Ciaran Barnes, Sunday Life reporter and the man whose oblique reporting of Dolours Price’s IRA career touched off the Boston College subpoenas and who, using a false name on the internet, urged me to hand over the interviews so confidential sources could be burned, the worst sin in journalism’s playbook.
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| Ciaran Barnes |
Following a hearing in London on 24th July 2013, the NUJ Appeals Tribunal upheld an appeal by journalist Anthony McIntyre.
The Appeals Tribunal overturned the findings of a subcommittee of the NUJ’s Ethics Council of 25th March 2013 pursuant to a Rule 24 complaint lodged by Allison Morris and Ciaran Barnes which alleged that Mr McIntyre had breached clauses 2, 3 and 4 of the NUJ’s Code of Conduct.
The NUJ Appeals Tribunal found that Mr McIntyre had “no case to answer” and that he had not breached any part of the code as alleged.
The Appeals Tribunal overturned the 6 month suspension and formal reprimand issued by the Ethics Council.
In its decision of 25th March 2013, the Ethics Council subcommittee had found that Mr. McIntyre had breached Clause 2 of the Code of Conduct which requires that a journalist should “strive to ensure that information disseminated is honestly conveyed accurate and fair” as well as Clause 3 which requires that he “do his utmost to correct harmful inaccuracies.”
However, the Ethics Council had declined to make a finding of a breach of Clause 4, which requires a journalist to “differentiate between fact and opinion” due to the difficulty the Ethics Council experienced “in differentiating between fact and opinion in reaching a conclusion concerning the publication,” a finding which Mr. McIntyre had described on appeal as “nonsensical.”
The Appeals Tribunal decided indeed that “the matter complained of was clearly an expression of opinion” and concluded that there was no case to answer.
Mr. McIntyre welcomed the decision by the NUJ Appeals Tribunal to overturn the flawed decision-making and penalties issued by the Ethics Council.
Mr McIntyre states that after a ‘scrupulously fair hearing’ before the Appeals Tribunal he is ‘extremely happy to have been totally vindicated and to know that the baseless claims by the two Belfast journalists, Allison Morris and Ciaran Barnes, were rejected in their entirety.’
He described the decision as a major victory for freedom of expression over those who would seek to suppress it.
“The growing culture of censorship in the North is under scrutiny, and UUP leader Mike Nesbitt, alone amongst political leaders, appears to be attuned to this problem in his current attempts to introduce legislation that would push back the constraints on free expression. The Tribunal decision is important in this context because it effectively entreats journalists to oppose censorship rather than impose it.”
Mr McIntyre concluded:
“While extremely satisfied with the outcome, it is my sincere hope and expectation that those news outlets which announced the flawed Ethics Council verdict against me in March will have the professional courtesy to provide the same level of coverage to this indisputable and unalloyed vindication.”
STATEMENT OF NUJ APPEALS TRIBUNAL
BACKGROUND
For background to Allison Morris's and Ciaran Barnes's complaints against Anthony McIntyre see: NUJ Wiki Dump
NUJ Should Put Morris And Barnes In The Dock
Ed Moloney
The Broken Elbow
March 28, 2013
I have the following statement to make in reference to the NUJ’s decision to suspend Anthony McIntyre from union membership for six months on foot of a complaint lodged by Allison Morris of The Irish News and Ciaran Barnes of The Sunday Life that he had allegedly breached ethics.
The wrong person was brought up in front of the NUJ’s ethics council in relation to this matter. Allison Morris and Ciaran Barnes are the people who have breached the NUJ’s code of conduct and it is they who should be suspended, not Anthony McIntyre.
The following facts in relation to the origins of the PSNI subpoenas issued against the Belfast Project archive at Boston College are, I believe, beyond dispute:
1. When Allison Morris interviewed the late Dolours Price in February 2010, Dolours was undergoing psychiatric care at St Patrick’s hospital Dublin. When her family learned that the interview was underway they asked Morris to end the interview because of her illness but this request was refused;
2. Following subsequent conversations between Dolours Price’s family and the management of the Irish News, agreement was reached on the manner in which the story would be treated in the paper’s coverage. No direct quotes were used, restraint would be exercised in relation to what she had alleged in the interview and Dolours Price would agree to take her story to the ICLVR, the so-called ‘disappeared’ commission. The Irish News evidently accepted the family’s view that in Dolours’ mental state caution should be exercised in how the story was treated;
3. The Irish News complied with that agreement but Allison Morris breached it. She took her tapes/story to her friend and former Andersonstown News colleague Ciaran Barnes in The Sunday Life and three days later he published an unrestrained account based, I firmly believe, on Allison Morris’ taped interview with Dolours Price. The Irish News abided by the agreement with her family but their reporter did not. If that is not a breach of ethics I do not know what is;
4. In the course of his story Barnes suggested that he had listened to Dolours Price’s taped interview with Boston College and in it she had admitted helping to ‘disappear’ Jean McConville. The US Attorney for Massachusetts, Carmen Ortiz, specifically cited this claim from Barnes in court papers as justification for issuing the subpoenas against Boston College. There is no doubt in my mind that the behaviour of Allison Morris and Ciaran Barnes led directly to the legal action instituted by the PSNI in Belfast and the Department of Justice in America;
5. The proof that Ciaran Barnes could not have listened to the taped interview that Dolours Price gave to Boston College lies in the fact, to which I have attested in an affidavit, that she never once mentioned the Jean McConville case nor her alleged part in that woman’s disappearance in her interview with Anthony McIntyre. The effect of his claim was to disguise the fact that his source was Allison Morris and that she had breached the agreement her editor made with the Price family;
6. It therefore follows that Barnes’ source had to be Allison Morris, the only other person who had talked to Dolours Price in the run up to his article. It is surely no coincidence that his story appeared three days after Allison Morris’ story appeared in The Irish News, and that he and Allison Morris are friends and former colleagues.
I too am a member of the NUJ although I now live and work in the United States. In 1999 I was made an honorary life-time member of the union, an award I was honoured to accept. I have to say however that I am dismayed at this decision by the ethics council and more so by the manner in which it was reached. The wrong people were charged with a breach of ethics and I now call on the leadership of the NUJ to institute a full inquiry into the behaviour of Allison Morris and Ciaran Barnes in relation to the interview of Dolours Price of February 2010 and its aftermath.
I also call on the NUJ to include in this investigation an examination of the relationship between the PSNI and the media in Northern Ireland with specific reference to the differential treatment of journalists in the pursuit of confidential sources.
Complete coverage:
UPDATE July, 2013: NUJ VINDICATES BOSTON COLLEGE RESEARCHER
Following a hearing in London on 24th July 2013, the NUJ Appeals Tribunal upheld an appeal by journalist Anthony McIntyre....[click for more]
On 22 November, 2012, the NUJ informed Anthony McIntyre that complaints had been lodged against him by Ciaran Barnes and Allison Morris, in relation to a blog post written by Mark McGregor published on The Pensive Quill in May, 2012.
Mark's post had previously been removed upon an informal request by local NUJ members on behalf of Allison Morris, and the withdrawal of the post by Mark himself. Anthony had not once been contacted by Allison Morris or Ciaran Barnes. Noel Doran, the Editor of the Irish News, prior to the approach from local NUJ members, contacted Anthony and threatened to bring legal action against him.
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