THE Teilifis na Gaeilge coverage of Mrs Maire Geoghegan Quinn's resignation did not infringe any privacy rights, the station's head of news, Mr Michael Lally, has said.
He confirmed that on the morning of the Fianna Fail TD's resignation a TnaG news team filmed at the school previously attended by her son.
"I would say they spent 2 1/2 minutes outside St Mary's, shooting from the edge of the gate. They spoke to no one, no one spoke to them, no one asked them, to leave or anything like that," he said.
"We were not there in any shape or form, as has been suggested, to get a shot of Ma ire Geoghegan Quinn's son. She didn't want anything like that, and anyway the son wasn't attending the college at that time."
Mr Lally said the news team was not asked to leave the scene by a staff member, as reported in yesterday's editions of The Irish Times. The shots were broadcast that night as part of the station's coverage of the resignation.
He also confirmed that the same news team went to the school the son is now attending, following his departure from St Mary's, and filmed from across the road. This footage was not broadcast.
"It was only a stock shot, in case there were any developments in the story in that area," he said. "We never went into the school or anything like that. It was what we call a GV (general vision) shot."
Responding to criticisms that the station's news coverage was moving in the direction of tabloid journalism, Mr Lally said some people had confused the station's human interest style with the tabloid approach.
On the night of Mrs Geoghegan Quinn's resignation, its coverage included local reaction from Carna in the Connemara Gaeltacht, where she was born. This was in keeping with its policy of getting reaction from "the plain people of Ireland" to major stories.
"IF the law supposes that," says Mr Bumble when he is told in Oliver Twist that his miscreant wife will be presumed by a court of law to be acting directly under his instructions, "then the law is a ass - a idiot. If that's the eye o' the law, the law is a' bachelor."
There are times, however, when the law is not so much "a ass", but ignorant - not ignorant in the sense that it does not know its own business, but rather in that it must on occasion call upon experts from other disciplines to provide specialised information to make a picture clear. When it comes to weather matters, for example, lawyers and the police may find it useful now and then to consult a forensic meteorologist. Let's look at one or two examples.
Horace Rumpole, you may recall, was very proud of his self taught expertise in blood stains, particularly insofar as it contributed to his single handed triumph in the famous "Penge Bungalow Murders".
The meteorological equivalent is "The Rain Hat Murder Case". The murdered body of a young woman was found in a disused Toronto car park on a dry, bright evening - lying, naturally enough, on ground that was quite dry. But an astute young police officer noted that a rain hat, found folded in her handbag, was wet on the inside. From this it was inferred that the woman must have been killed shortly after a heavy shower of rain.
Enter the meteorologist. Given the approximate time of death, the weather sleuth was able to use satellite pictures and rainfall records to identify those parts of the city where rain showers had occurred around the time of the murder. As it happened, there were not many showers that day, so the police were able to focus their inquiries on a few likely areas. A successful arrest was made within hours.
Another instance concerned an inquest in a coroner's court, where the evidence of the weatherman brought great comfort to the family of a girl who had apparently committed suicide by walking straight in front of a speeding train. The climatological evidence showed, however, that a hailstorm was in progress at the time; moreover, the wind had been blowing from such a direction that the victim, trying to shield herself from the hail, would more than likely have turned her face away, and been quite unaware of an approaching train. This was sufficient to convince the jury that the death was accidental and they returned their verdict accordingly.