I’m searching for the audio on the soon to be legendary interview with Eoghan Harris this evening on the Last Word on Today FM – but Anthony at Public Enquiry has the transcript. (Blogs might have helped a bit and talked about it and done the sums but as for the rest I think we’d be found very not guilty!)
Matt Cooper – How do you feel about this?
Harris - I feel sick, I’m going through the death thing, denial first and then anger. I think the public is going to go through the same series of shocks. There’s going to be a lot of grief about Bertie Ahern.A few days ago when I spoke about him here there was an extraordinary amount of vitriolic texts and this has been par for the course across the media.
I don’t know whether put in by Fine Gael or a group of sour heads in Sinn Fein. There’s a virulent group of people out there helping this campaign, especially on the internet, the blogs reached an incredible level of abuse in the last ten to fifteen days, and I mean really bad stuff.
OOOOO- u nasty, vicious Bertie-haters- how could you?! Now Eoghan has no one to play with him.
Shucks Eoghan! That’s the greatest endorsement ever! no recourse to made-up statistics or anything.
Evil bold blogs-Maman Poulet i can’t wait to hear that interview -The sindo on Sunday should be hilarious! Eoghan can now focus is on his weekly appearance as a judge on ‘talent show’ Glas Vegas on tg4 to entertain him!
Drivetime had a spat between Eoghan Harris and the editor of the Phoenix – very funny
“I am crying, saying this”
Best bit of the interview was when he corrected Michael Clifford – “SENATOR Eoghan Harris if you please”.
What a jumped-up nonentity. He had the time of his life yesterday flitting from one radio station to the next with his media conspiracy nonsense.
Back to Glas Vegas with you Senator.
Very interesting entry. As I didn’t hear the programme on Today FM, I am grateful to learn about it.
Eoghan Harris is a pompous buffoon and always has been. He is so full of himself that he is the least qualified person to advise anyone on anything. I never understood why people take even any notice of him. It must be the Irish mentality that in order to get noticed you have to be a bully.
But what he said about the effect blogs had on the exposure of Bertie as a fraud and a liar could well be true. The internet has become a powerful tool. It is probably the last tool left to ordinary people in a world that is ever more controlled by states and big corporations.
Though some Irish media played a part in Bertie’s downfall, the great and good of RTÉ and the national papers tend to treat politicians still with way too much respect and courtesy.
Many of the blogs I read put the facts about Bertie much clearer than papers or RTÉ, and were also more outspoken in their comments. Even though it is difficult to quantify the impact of an individual blog, I think the combined (even though uncoordinated) force of a number of blogs pointing out the same facts had certainly some influence on people’s minds. And that includes the minds of politicians.
I contributed a few pieces myself, and people with government computers (irl.gov) are reading my blog regularly. I only started blogging in January, but have a long record as a political analyst. (Have a look for yourself at http://inishtrahoull.blogspot.com/ )
As it happens, I called on Bertie to resign before the summer (on the basis of information I have) a day before he did exactly that. One does not have such a quick “success” often.
So, perhaps Harris spotted the chink in Fianna Fail’s armour where a humble man’s arrow could get through and even hurt the chief himself. What ever Harris is at any given time, he is quite an intelligent man. However, his idea that Fine Gael or Sinn Fein could have organised some bloggers to bring down Bertie is pretty idiotic. Fine Gael does not even manage to get all their local branches organised, and if you want to see the IT skills of Sinn Fein, have a look at their website. Each time I have checked, their front page information was out of date.
We – the bloggers – should be happy to have played a part in the exposure of Bertie, no matter how small it might have been. And the thought alone that one could somehow be responsible for Eoghan Harris feeling sick is a very comfortable one and makes me smile.
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