REACTION:MINISTER FOR Communications Pat Rabbitte has described the RTÉ documentary A Mission to Prey that defamed Fr Kevin Reynolds as a "shoddy, unprofessional, cavalier, damaging piece of work".
Speaking on the RTÉ News last night after the publication of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) report, Mr Rabbitte said it posed a fundamental challenge to RTÉ to re-establish its reputation and to rebuild the trust it has had with the Irish people.
“It is quite disturbing that a man’s character could have been traduced in such a cavalier fashion,” he said. It was “beyond belief” that a programme that had won such a high reputation for its investigative journalism “should put together a piece of work based on frankly no more than uncorroborated gossip”.
He said he would be meeting the chairman and the board of RTÉ on Tuesday at 8am.
Although he said a “commendable raft of changes” had been implemented thus far, and there had been a lot done, there was “to coin a phrase, a lot more to do”.
The RTÉ board and its director general yesterday accepted the findings of an investigation into the Prime Time Investigates programme A Mission to Prey, which it said had resulted in the “grievous defamation of the innocent Fr Kevin Reynolds”.
Speaking on behalf of the board, RTÉ chairman Tom Savage said that, since last autumn, the broadcaster has been dealing with “the unprecedented results of grave editorial failures” the consequences of which had been “serious in the extreme”.
“I hope it’s now clear that we have been doing a very great deal in recent months to restore faith in our journalism,” he said, adding comprehensive reforms in editorial structures, management and operations had been introduced.
The broadcaster said it had responded to recommendations contained in the report showing how each had been met with “specific actions designed to redress the particular errors and potential ongoing risks identified by the BAI” including guidelines specific to investigative journalism, “doorstepping” and surreptitious recording.
The broadcaster also published an independent report by Prof John Horgan into the safety of editorial processes, adding it had adopted a number of measures in addition to those in the report.
Director general of RTÉ Noel Curran said the findings of yesterday’s BAI report and that of the inquiry by Anna Carragher did “not make easy reading for RTÉ”.
“We are not proud of the picture presented in the findings. However, we have learned from and we will continue to learn from these grave errors,” he said.
“A great deal has changed in recent months at RTÉ and more will change as we embed the new structures which have been introduced through our work to overcome this regrettable period in RTÉ’s history.”
The National Union of Journalists, representing journalist Aoife Kavanagh and former current affairs editor Ken O’Shea, said it was “not satisfied with aspects of the investigation process and [did] not accept many of the conclusions” in respect of its members.
It said the investigating officer had not accepted many of the issues raised by the union, including what it said were factual inaccuracies in the executive summary.
It also said the BAI did not appear to have taken into account in any serious way submissions made on behalf of Ms Kavanagh and Mr O’Shea and that it believed the report of the investigation officer was incomplete “because she did not seek to interview representatives of the RTÉ legal department, who were central to the decision-making process”.
The union also issued a separate statement on behalf of Aoife Kavanagh to say that she would be resigning her post.