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THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW: JACK O’CONNOR, President of Ictu

No-one could chastise him more than Jack O’Connor himself. “I do feel bad because I didn’t intend to offend him at all and I didn’t make the connection with the sensitivities he might have around that. But I apologised at the first opportunity . . . it just came out,” he tails off miserably. To aggravate matters, his eye catches the large, indubitably sinister-looking picture of himself on the front of The Irish Times, a depiction he suspects is deliberate. A more serious problem is that the television show was far from his finest hour and he knows it. One well-disposed viewer described his performance as “impenetrable”. A commentator suggested that it placed him up there with banker Sean FitzPatrick as a national hate figure for the “squeezed” middle classes.