Pundit and former politician Ivan Yates told TDs and Senators he “deliberately” didn’t tell his podcast co-host Matt Cooper that he provided media training to Jim Gavin during the recent presidential election.
Mr Yates, a former Fine Gael TD who served as minister for agriculture in the mid-1990s, was axed from the Path to Power podcast earlier this month when it emerged he had coached Mr Gavin, Fianna Fáil’s candidate.
Speaking before the Oireachtas Media Committee on Wednesday evening, Mr Yates said that when the news “blew up” on November 1st, he told Mr Cooper: “I deliberately didn’t tell you, because I didn’t want you to be in any way conflicted.”
Mr Yates continued: “In other words, he could say, ‘Oh, I never knew any of this’, and it was a statement of fact.”
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He said that if he had told Mr Cooper about the training, “it would have put him in a very invidious position”.
“I took full responsibility for myself, and I took those decisions, knowingly and in real time.”
[ The Ivan Yates affair is a symptom of a wider problem in the Irish mediaOpens in new window ]
Mr Yates told the committee it would not be possible to “police” every single conflict of interest.
“A guaranteed mood killer in the [media] environment would have been if we had been forced to preface every debate with a disclaimer or a declaration of interests,” he said.
“Do we want to drown our legacy media in more and more onerous regulations, rules and protocols or do we want to trust people to manage reasonable situations reasonably, and to trust their audiences to make up their own mind?”
Mr Yates is a former bookmaker and broadcaster who was a co-host of the Path To Power political podcast with Today FM’s Matt Cooper. He served as a Fine Gael TD from 1981 to 2002, and was minister for agriculture from 1994 to 1997.
A number of committee members asked Mr Yates if he regretted saying that Fine Gael should “smear the bejaysus” out of Catherine Connolly during the presidential election.
How Ivan Yates’s links to Fianna Fáil have landed him in hot water
He said he didn’t necessarily regret the remark itself, but regrets how it was “weaponised” by the Connolly campaign and had a negative impact on Heather Humphrey’s campaign.
“I do regret the impact that phrase had on the whole campaign. And put it like this, I would much rather that it hadn’t happened, but I’m saying the reason it happened was it was weaponised by the Connolly campaign.”
Mr Yates said he didn’t know “how important” his remarks were “in the overall scheme of things” as Catherine Connolly won 63 per cent of the vote.
“It was going to be a clear winner, in my view, anyway ... after the Gavin implosion.”
Mr Gavin received training from Mr Yates before withdrawing from the presidential election in early October after it emerged that he owed money to a previous tenant, whom he has since repaid.
Mr Yates also told the committee he was concerned about plans to regulate podcasts.
“Podcasts hold a very important space in the media ecosystem, and a major part of their attraction is that they take a looser, less cautious, more contrarian approach to issues and allow voices to be heard that are increasingly hard to hear in the so-called mainstream media.”
