Attack on corporate greed censored

The linkages and similarities between Independent News and Media and Irish Ferries. By Colin Murphy, Emma Browne, John Byrne and Vincent Browne

Justine McCarthy had written a biting attack on Irish corporate greed. She wrote it in the context of the Irish Ferries dispute but her scope was broader. She wrote about the adulation of RyanAir, which had banned trade unions, charged disabled people for access to their planes and engaged in confrontational promotion, all to boost already overblown profits. She wrote of the warrior managerial culture that pervades the Celtic Tiger Ireland. Someone who read the column before it went into the computer system of the Irish Independent said her target could as well have been the management culture of Independent Newspapers itself (see accompanying story).

She did not realise the column had been dropped until a colleague asked her about it on Monday morning (28 November). She saw the editor, Gerry O'Regan, who is in the job only a few weeks, and he told her she had no entitlement either to have the column published or to be informed in advanced that the column was being "spiked" (the journalistic terms for discarded). It was a confrontational encounter.

Later Gerry O'Regan informed her she was being dropped as a columnist – she is employed as a feature writer and was paid additionally as a columnist. He offered no reason for dropping her, saying merely that she had no right to expect to be retained as a columnist for ever. He further said he didn't "spike" a column, it was just a piece of news analysis.

There had been a disagreement between Justine McCarthy and Gerry O'Regan a few weeks previously. She had done an interview with Bishop Willie Walsh, in the wake of the publication of the Ferns report. He was the first bishop to speak in public after the report had been published and in the interview he had spoken out about the ordination of women, the celibacy of the priesthood and Church/State relations, all hugely pertinent especially in the light of the attack by Liz O'Donnell on the Catholic Church a few days previously and Bertie Ahern's response. Gerry O'Regan was insistent the interview be published in an inside page in the Saturday Review section of the newspaper – he wanted an extract from the book by economist and commentator, David McWilliams published as the main feature. But that discussion had been relatively amicable.

The row with Justine McCarthy came the same day (Monday 28 November) as another surprising decision by Gerry O'Regan: that to "stand down" the industrial correspondent of the Irish Independent, Gerry Flynn, from reporting on the Irish Ferries story. Flynn had reported on the previous Saturday that management at Irish Ferries had considered using tear gas to dislodge protesting workers from the ferries some months previously. This was vigorously denied by Irish Ferries management but Flynn persisted with the story and repeated it in a front page article in the Sunday Independent on 27 November. Then, without warning, Gerry Flynn, the newspaper's industrial relations correspondent, was removed from coverage of the most significant industrial relations story of recent years. He first heard of this decision, not from the management of the Irish Independent but from a journalist with another publication who telephoned him as he was on his way to the office.

When he got to the new offices of Independent Newspapers on Talbot St, Gerry O'Regan informed him he was being withdrawn from coverage of the story because of a general threat by Irish Ferries against the media in general, according to a source in Independent Newspapers.

Gerry Flynn consulted the NUJ about the matter and the issue is to be discussed at a union-management meeting on Thursday (1 December). In addition to that an inquiry has been instituted into Flynn's story about Irish Ferries and the tear gas option. This inquiry is to be conducted by the same team that inquired into the Sunday Independent's coverage of the death in Moscow of Liam Lawlor: Michael Deniffe, the managing editor of the group, Declan Carlyle or "human resources" and Tony O'Reilly (no relation) also of "human resources".

That team's inquiry into the Liam Lawlor story – where the Sunday Independent reported in its headline on the front page that a woman in the car with Liam Lawlor, when he was killed, was "likely to be a prostitute" – seemed exhaustive. The team travelled to Moscow to interview contacts and interviewed several journalists on the staff of the Sunday Independent, including its editor, Aengus Fanning.

According to a well-placed source in the Sunday Independent the outcome of this inquiry has been to recommend some procedural changes in the newspaper. Neither the editor, Aengus Fanning, neither the deputy editor, Anne Harris, are to be fired apparently.

One of the intriguing dimensions to the coverage of the Irish Ferries story by the Irish Independent is the corporate overlap between Independent Newspaper and Media and the company that owns Irish Ferries, Irish Continental Group. Bernard Somers, a close business associate of Tony O'Reilly, the controlling shareholder and chief executive of Independent News and Media (INM), is on the board of both INM and Irish Continental.

Bernard Somers is aged fifty six He was appointed to the board of Irish Continental Group (ICG) in 2004 as a non-executive director. He is a non-executive director of Independent News and Media, as well as of some other companies including the glass-making company Ardagh plc and DCC. A chartered accountant, he is a partner in Somers and Associates, and accountants practice which specialises in corporate restructuring. He was involved in the corporate restructuring of Aer Lingus in 2001. He also worked as a consultant to CIE and as an adviser to business man Larry Goodman. He is a brother of Michael Somers, the head of the National Treasury Management Agency.