Student plans to have Dublin West TD Mr Liam Lawlor officially open a radio station at a vocational college in Dublin yesterday were changed after opposition from some teachers. Mr Lawlor, however, gave a live interview to the station run by journalism students at Ballyfermot College of Further Education.
The students have an IRTC permit to broadcast Xtreme 103.8 FM for one week until Saturday. The press received invitations to the "official launch" by Mr Lawlor, who served seven days in Mountjoy prison in January for his failure to co-operate with the Flood tribunal.
At the last moment yesterday, it emerged that Mr Lawlor would not be opening the station, but would be its first interviewee.
Interviewed by Ms Rathfionna de Burca, he said he spent his time in Mountjoy catching up on paperwork. He had neither received nor expected favourable treatment from prison staff.
On his evidence to the Flood tribunal, Mr Lawlor "respectfully" suggested that the scope of questioning at the tribunal had been much broader than he had believed it would have been, and that he had then had "just a week to recover my life story".
He said he expected to produce documents to the tribunal by the end of March but if an extension was required, his team would go in to discuss it. He also said he wished he had "never bothered" becoming a member of Dublin County Council in 1979 "for all the trouble it caused".
A teacher at the college, Ms Helen Mahony, said that 26 staff had signed a letter calling on the principal to cancel plans to have the TD launch the radio station. "There was extreme concern and certainly the majority of senior members of staff were against it. I'm very concerned about the reputation of the college."
There was no objection, however, to the station interviewing him, she said. Teachers had requested that a second press release be issued by the students overriding the original one. "I think a terrible error was made in terms of asking him to launch it, but the important thing is that it was cancelled."
Another teacher, Ms Jacinta O'Keeffe, said some staff opposed Mr Lawlor's visit because of "the abysmal way in which he has treated the tribunals and the public", but she acknowledged that "another point of view is that he did his time for his contempt". While the school acknowledged that some invitations stating Mr Lawlor would officially launch the station had been sent out, the deputy principal, Ms Rita Clifford, said as far as she was concerned, he had not been asked to launch it.