Sir, – Your Front page report (February 15th) stated that Morgan Fuels received payments of €3,000 from the Martin McGuinness for president campaign. In the body of the report it was claimed that the presenter of RTÉ’s Frontline programme of October 24th, 2011, Pat Kenny, read out “what turned out to be a bogus tweet”. RTÉ would like to set the record straight: the presenter did not read out any bogus tweet on the programme.
Pat Kenny put the following to Seán Gallagher: “Now, a development I want to put to Seán Gallagher – on the Martin McGuinness for President twitter account, Sinn Féin are saying that they are going to produce the man who gave you a cheque for five grand. Now do you want to change what you said, or are you still saying it just simply didn’t happen? Or are they up to dirty tricks, or what?”
The term bogus can only refer accurately to the provenance of the tweet. The information contained in the tweet was essentially accurate: Sinn Féin the next day identified Hugh Morgan as the businessman who was claiming that Seán Gallagher had solicited a donation of €5,000 for Fianna Fáil in 2008. As you may be aware there were two near-identical twitter accounts purporting to be Martin McGuinness for President accounts. The tweet that was referred to on The Frontline programme came from what we now know was the “unofficial” account which had been registered on the same day as the official account and had been active since its registration. The tweet had been noted and re-tweeted by several hundred people on the evening of the broadcast of The Frontline programme including senior newspaper journalists and one Irish newspaper editor, before it was raised in good faith by Mr Kenny on the live broadcast. The information in this tweet was put to Mr Gallagher with an express invitation for him to put forward his view.
RTÉ has made detailed and lengthy submissions to the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland in response to complaints about this issue and these will be published by the BAI when it has had the opportunity to consider the matter and make its adjudication. In the meantime RTÉ will not comment further on this issue as it is before the Compliance Committee of the BAI. RTÉ does not wish in any way to influence or be seen to influence the BAI’s deliberations. However, this is a disputed matter and it is important that your reporting of it is fully fair and accurate. – Yours, etc,