Standards in public office, i.e. RTE

I never cease to be amazed by politicians who get caught in journalistic stings, about which I have reservations. That said, of the three cases highlighted, the Monaghan county councillor's behaviour was so outrageous that he might indeed have realized it was a sting. The other two were sailing close to the wind but I'm not sure if their actions could be said to constitute breaches of any code or something more serious. The Donegal county councillor is very young and certainly needs to grow up. No doubt he has grown up a lot since last night. 

People in this State are never happier than when they are unhappy about the state of ... well the State. The RTE programme last night threw up three cases of possible improper behaviour but RTE acted as if they had found 300 councillors with their hands in the till. It seems that the programme makers contacted a number of other councillors who refused to play ball - either because they didn't fall for the sting or for some other reason. RTE, however, didn't tell us how many councillors there are in the State, how many they had contacted and how many had refused to talk to them. Any serious and responsible programme maker would have provided that information at the beginning of the programme to allow the viewers to appreciate the scale of the alleged wrong doing uncovered. Perhaps RTE would have provided the information if the number of councillors falling for the sting had been more numerous. Three is a derisory number.

Listening to Fintan O'Toole on Prime Time afterwards, who should perhaps be styled the National Professor of Verbal Diarrhoe, you would think that wholesale corruption had been uncovered. There is only so much of O'Toole I can put up so I didn't watch the whole of the Prime Time programme afterwords. I don't know if either of the panelists or anyone in the audience questioned RTE about their failure to provide the public with the basic statistics referred to in the previous paragraph without which the programme was meaningless.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that having spent nearly a year (?) preparing the programme and having discovered very little RTE were determined to make the most of it and blew it out of all proportion. They should perhaps be more worried about their own standards than those of the local authorities.