Conor Brady raised eyebrows when he was appointed as editor of The Irish Times, as he was the first Catholic to hold the position. While there, the paper covered stories that shook the nation and its circulation reached around 122,000 the year before he left.

After a professional career in roles spanning from journalist to editor, Garda Ombudsman to crime fiction writer, he is now moving to tech. Brady, and his son Neil, are developing a tool called Caliber AI, which aims to catch defamation and statements of toxicity in text. Their solution could save newsrooms and firms millions in legal expenses.

Brady talks about this new project, his life in journalism and policing plus his views on government formation with Sam Smyth.

Other topics of this interview include:

• The change to newsrooms and the future of newspapers
• His education at Roscrea
• Breaking the story of Bishop Eamon Casey giving diocesan funds to Annie Murphy
• How being the son of a guard spurred a life long interest in Ireland’s police force
• Cutting 300 jobs in The Irish Times before he left
• The increasing lack of transparency in An Garda Síochana
• Why he believes a Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil government is a good thing
• Selling his Regency-revival home on De Vesci Terrace
• The prospect of a united Ireland and whether Sinn Fein still has ties to the provisional IRA

*****

Sam Smyth (SS): Hello, I’m Sam Smyth and welcome to my podcast with The Currency. My guest today is Conor Brady, the son of a guard who became the first Catholic to be appointed editor of The Irish Times. And now with his son, he hopes to save the media millions and they hope to make millions for themselves with their unique innovation with artificial intelligence. What it does is it flags potential defamations in text. In fact, it is an ‘AI libel spotter.’ A sort of rattrap for defamation.

Conor, you founded a new media technology business with your son Neil. You called it Caliber AI. What exactly does it do, and how much does it cost?

Conor Brady (CB): I actually can’t answer either of those questions because we’re not sure yet that it is going to do what we hope it will do. But the tests are proving very positive. And the financial model is yet to be fixed behind it.

I’ll give you a bit of the background. As you know, I was a newspaper editor for many years, almost 25 years in one paper or the other. Neil was a founder, a staff member of Mark Little’s Storyful. Then he went to work for The Guardian. Then he came back to Dublin to work with the Institute of International Affairs. When he was there, he headed up their artificial intelligence research department. So, he developed this great interest, he doesn’t have any technical qualifications, but he developed a huge interest in the potential of artificial intelligence.

He saw that it could be brought to bear upon editorial processes and, in conversation with me over time, we conceived essentially an algorithm, a computer based program, which if you feed enough information into it, should enable journalists, editors, publishers to be alerted when whatever they are writing or producing appears to be about to stray into areas of defamation or toxicity. It should effectively act in the role that used to be discharged by the old subeditors in newspapers that you and I would have known.

SS: When you say toxicity or defamation, one is the law – defamation. If you defame somebody, they’re likely to claim a lot of money from you. Toxicity, is to do with taste, I presume?

CB: Toxicity can range from being relatively inoffensive to being quite poisonous. You could be talking about anti-Semitism. You could be talking about homophobia. You could be talking about climate change denial. You could be talking about Islamophobia. You could be talking about racism.

And there are many degrees of that, obviously. But very often I think in media, in my experience as an editor and I’m sure in your experience as a journalist down the years, very often it’s the unintended conjunction of words together or the unintended conjunction of sentiments together that actually will create a problem, and that can give offence to people. And while defamation has got an obvious price tag, toxicity doesn’t, but it can be very costly. For example, when George Hook got into difficulty on his radio show for making certain remarks, there was no defamation involved. But there was a big price tag to be paid.

SS: Well there was offence taken.

CB: Offense was taken. So, it was adjudged by a large proportion of people that what he was saying was toxic and unacceptable and there was a price tag attached to that.

SS: Although is that at a cost to free speech, to a certain extent?

CB: There is that other element to it then. That is what we’ve got to factor into this technology as well, that you can’t really subvert people’s right to free speech. So, what we’re saying to people, and we’ve got partners working with us on this, lawyers and philosophers and newspaper people and publishers and indeed The Currency itself, what we’re saying to people is: ‘This isn’t going to make decisions for you. This isn’t going to take away your right. But what it’s going to say to you is, if you put this into print or if you put it out online, there is a possibility that it will be interpreted as being toxic or defamatory, so think again.’

SS: There’s a linguist, Alan Reid, you’ve asked him to identify taboo expressions for you? What does that mean?

CB: Well, there are a number of key words, as you know. I was involved in many, many cases of libel and alleged libel in The Irish Times and I’m sure you, although you were utterly scrupulous in your in your professional life, I’m sure you found yourself from time to time having to give account of yourself as well.

There are some key words which will signify… Obviously, there is vulgarity in relation to race, in relation to sexual orientation. But there are keywords like dishonest, mistrustful and unworthy. Looking at the defamation libel cases that I dealt with in my years as editor of The Irish Times, the greater proportion of them was to do with allegations that people were unfit for office or were misrepresenting themselves in some way that they were not…

SS: That they were dishonest?

CB: That they were dishonest, or that they were abusing their position. So, there are key phrases around that. So, what we’ve been doing is we’ve been building up a huge vocabulary of such language and such phrases like, for example, ‘you wouldn’t trust that fella’, ‘you’d count your fingers after you shake hands with him’, which is relatively inoffensive, but which can actually have an innuendo right down to that guy is cooking the books or the manager in that bank needs to be watched. So, there’s a whole panoply of language. What the computer has to do and this, of course, is because the enormous, vast computing power that now reposes within artificial intelligence is going to bring all of that language together, watch out for patterns that develop in what people are writing or putting online and sending off a signal to say ‘hey, think again about this.’

The business of questionable language and the importance of free speech

SS: To see what you think is questionable language, you’ve put together a team. I was just looking at them there, your advisers are former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, Irish philosopher Onora O’Neill, McCann Fitzgerald’s Karyn Harty. And I was just thinking to myself it is like a Donnybrook dinner party. What do each of them bring to the table?

CB: Google tried to do something similar to this. They developed a program called Perspective. And it really isn’t very subtle. And we believe the reason that it didn’t achieve the potential that it should have was because the input was probably, from what we’ve gleaned, largely from technical people.

So, what we’ve done is we have assembled an advisory council which comprises, as you say, McCann Fitzgerald, their lawyers, they’re one of the leading media law companies in these islands. And they handle media law for a large number of clients, Irish and international. So, they have a lot of experience in this. Baroness O’Neil, Onora O’Neill from Northern Ireland is probably Britain’s leading philosopher in the whole area of free speech. And we have your good selves in The Currency, we thought it was important to involve a new sharp-edged start-up of young, ambitious journalists. We will be asking you to trial test the machine with us very shortly. We have the Tindle Media Group from the United Kingdom. Tindle owns 200 regional newspapers and radio stations. And we have also got Rory Godson, who runs Powerscourt Consultants in London.

SS: And tell me, when you say the machine, the first thing I thought of there was Back to the Future. Something connected to the church tower or something. Is there a physical machine or is it a cassette that I put into the computer?

CB: It will emerge effectively as a plug-in. It will operate in the same way on your system as, for example, Grammarly or spellcheck.

It’ll be there. It’ll be an icon on the screen. It depends on the decisions of the purchaser. It can be on full time or it can be switched off. As you know and I, when spellcheck first came onto our screens in the newsrooms, some people didn’t like it. Some people resented it, some people were very happy to have it. I can recall a subeditor in The Irish Times turning on spellcheck and looking in and in astonishment saying out loud “Jesus, is that how you spell ‘Portlaoisha’?”

But this machine can be contoured and adapted to the particular needs of individual users.

For example, some journalists might say, “well actually this is going to be another big brother looking over our shoulder and we don’t want to use it”, to which we say,’ okay, it’s there. It’s an option. You don’t have to…’

If a piece of copy was turned out by a reporter, it would be seen by about five pairs of eyes before it got into the paper…So, all of those checks were there. The reality is that they’re not there anymore.

Conor Brady

SS: Well at the minute you’re being backed by Enterprise Ireland. The first thing that’s going to happen is if this shows itself to have possibilities, surely the great tech giants or indeed the rich-list types are going to come in offering money.

CB: Well, I’ll give you my number now Sam, if you’d like to put it out on air so we can hear from these people.

The financial structure is worth explaining a little bit. We found some very good friends and advisers who brought us to Enterprise Ireland and EI we have found excellent, very good to deal with, they’re very demanding, very stringent. They brought in an external panel of experts to assess this, they said yes, this is viable.

So EI operate this sort of start-up through universities. So, we’re doing this with ADAPT in Trinity, which is their on-campus Digital Innovation Company. The professor of computational linguistics, Carl Vogel down there is our PI on this. And we use the facilities of ADAPT. What that means is the intellectual property rights for the product rest with the university. We don’t actually own them and that’s the price you pay.

SS: That’s the price you pay for Enterprise Ireland investing…

CB: Exactly. So, your initial expression of optimism about the millions we were going to make out of this might have been a little bit ambitious because if this thing did turn into a huge success tomorrow, then the rights to that repose with the university rather than with us.

SS: Well, presumably you’re going to get walking around money at least?

CB: What would normally happen in that situation, and this is happening in other successful enterprises which spin out of ADAPT, is that they would license the product to us on favourable terms. And that would then enable us hopefully to find private capital investment, venture capital to come in with us, we’re talking to a number of people at the moment.

We have enough money to run this thing for this year. We are actually within weeks, perhaps within days of actually being able to put up a working model. We have a working model ourselves and we can play with it on the screen, but it needs a little bit more tweaking before we would put it before professionals like yourself and say, ‘tap in your story there and see what happens.’

But we’re talking weeks, not months. When we get to that stage, we hopefully will be talking to people who would see the potential of this and who would be willing to invest and help us to bring it to completion.

SS: When do you think it will be available for The Currency or any other?

CB: We hope that we will be able to put it up for trial testing within the next month to six weeks. And after that, it’s only a question of perfecting it for the market.

SS: The first thing I thought of when I saw this, whatever about The Currency or newspapers, is if you look at Twitter or Facebook, all of those social networking giants, surely they would want to identify potential defamation?

CB: One would imagine so. But these social media networks, for the moment, they are clinging to the fiction that they are not publishers.

SS: That’s changing.

CB: That is changing. And we believe that they’re going to lose that argument. And when that argument is resolved, and we’ve seen white paper on artificial intelligence coming out of the European Union, there’s legislative change underway in the United States…

SS: And Mark Zuckerberg is writing op-eds.

CB: Absolutely. I believe you’re going to find that they’re going to have to square up to that. That they are not just like a telephone company that provides wires for people. They’re going to have to square up to it.

In that situation, yes, I believe the technology that we’re developing, I think they would be foolhardy not to at least take a good long look at it.

I suppose, part of the motivation, part of my thinking on this was, I remember when I was editor of The Irish Times, if a piece of copy was turned out by a reporter, it would be seen by about five pairs of eyes before it got into the paper. It went to the news editor who read it. He passed to the chief sub editor who read it. He passed it to a subeditor who read it. He then passed it into the page. It would then be read by a revise editor and would probably be read again in the editor’s office by a managing editor. So, all of those checks were there. The reality is that they’re not there anymore.

SS: Well, spelling is the first thing you would think of. One sees spelling mistakes now where you wouldn’t have before.

CB: No, you wouldn’t. Absolutely. And of course, the apostrophe is rampant. The misplaced apostrophe. But we won’t worry about the apostrophe. Nobody ever sued for an apostrophe.

The son of a Guard who became editor of the “Paper of Record”

SS: Or the aberrant apostrophe as it was known as, yeah.

Tell me, just thinking about yourself and where you came from. You were a son of a senior guard, school in Roscrea, history and politics while editing the Campus News at UCD. Being an editor was written in your stars Conor, I would have thought?

CB: No, I was…

SS: Then the editor of the Sunday Tribune before becoming features editor and deputy editor and then taking up the big chair in The Irish Times in 1986.

CB: Yeah, I was fascinated by writing and journalism from the day, really, I went to Roscrea. I was only 12 and I went to boarding school. My father had died relatively young. And as I often say, I lost my father but in Roscrea I found many fathers. Among the monks. And one, Fr Denis, Fr Cataldus as he was known in religion, who just died in January, he was the man who was responsible for running the school magazine. And I worked very closely with him and I was appointed as editor of the school magazine. So, it kind of went logically from there.

SS: Fr Capaldis, did you say?

CB: Cataldus. He’s a saint a sixth century Irish saint from North Tipperary. Not much revered in North Tipperary anymore, but very revered in southern Italy, where there are 200 churches named after him.

SS: Well, I’m surprised hurling didn’t take off in Italy.

Listen, The Troubles were raging when you were editor of The Irish Times and I don’t think you put a foot wrong there. I can’t remember anything.

The first thing I suppose that everybody will recall of your time in the Irish Times was when you broke the story of Bishop Casey fathering a son in 1992. Would you say that that was a major change in Irish life and in newspaper publishing?

We could only publish what we could prove. And it’s very difficult, and was even more difficult in those days, to prove what has happened at anybody’s bedroom.

Conor Brady

CB: It was certainly a major change in Irish life. I mean, it was a total game changer for the relationship of the Roman Catholic faithful with their church. That relationship was under strain anyway. But the revelations that Eamon Casey, and later Fr Michael Cleary, were involved in these illicit relationships and had fathered children while they were, if you like, preaching the virtues of chastity and abstinence and celibacy.

SS: Well, it was hypocrisy mostly…

CB: The Casey one, we didn’t go looking for that story. It came to us.

SS: But you held on to it for a long time, which I happen to know about, before publishing. One can understand how careful you’d want to be. To make sure the I’s were dotted, the T’s crossed.

But later, I remember meeting Nuala O’Faolain who told me that she went into a meeting and threatened The Irish Times, that if they didn’t publish the story, she would give it to me, who was then working in The Sunday World.

And then when you did publish it Conor, the Irish Times seemed to make a bigger fuss about Bishop Casey trousering parish finances to support his son than breaking his vows of celibacy and fathering a child

CB: That’s one interpretation you could put upon it. As I saw it as editor, we could only publish what we could prove. And it’s very difficult, and was even more difficult in those days, to prove what has happened at anybody’s bedroom. And there were complications in the story. It was not as straightforward as it seemed. There were complications. It was possible that Bishop Casey was not in the frame, as we had been given to understand, there were other possibilities.

SS: Was there a lot of distracting flak sent up, presumably?

CB: No, I don’t think so. But what did happen was that a lot of sources that we went to, to verify Annie Murphy’s version of events, did not confirm what she told us they would confirm. That was, I think, largely dictated by fear on their part, because her story was true. It was our colleague, Conor O’Clery, who actually broke the story. In the end, the story that we published, and this was because we could actually prove this, we had evidence of the money trail, that nearly £90,000 had gone from the Galway diocesan funds to a lawyer in Kerry. And it had gone from Kerry to a lawyer in New York, and from that lawyer in New York to a Monsignor in Queens who was giving the money to Annie Murphy. This was diocesan funds. This was actually embezzlement.

If we got this wrong or if we couldn’t prove that it was right, we were going to be torn down

Conot Brady

And O’Clery was able to identify the money trail because the Monsignor in New York astonishingly said, “yeah, I’ll tell you all about it.” And he did. That we could prove. Then the question that had to be asked was, “well, if that’s happening, why is it happening?”

And the reality is that every other newspaper in the country and a lot of broadcasters actually put out the story about the son and about Annie Murphy and about the relationship. They didn’t have a scintilla of proof for it any more than we had. I suppose the proof of the narrative was that when we eventually did ask Eamon Casey to speak to us, he agreed to meet Joe Carroll and Andy Pollock in the Skyline Hotel on, I think it was Wednesday evening and we were going to publish the following day, he never turned up. And we learned he’d taken the Aer Lingus flight to New York. I suppose, the flight of Eamon Casey, in a sense, confirms what we were at.

So yeah, we did, we held back and we were very…

SS: But that was still not proof for you to…

CB: The other element of it was that I was very concerned that, here we were, the protestant Irish Times, if we got this wrong or if we couldn’t prove that it was right, we were going to be torn down. And there were a lot of people there who would be very happy. And I remember going down to talk to Pat Hannon, who was the professor of canon law down in Maynooth. And Pat would have been very much on the liberal wing of the clergy at that stage in Maynooth. He said, “if you get this wrong, The Irish Times will be destroyed.” And he said “that has to be part of the moral calculus because The Irish Times has a positive and influential role in this society. And if you’re destroyed or discredited, Ireland will be the poorer for it.” And that’s what I had to weigh in the balance.

SS: Well it was a great, I would say, triumph for journalism and you were telling the truth. Tell me, did you get a telegram from the editor of the Irish Independent Vinnie Doyle, after publishing the story?

CB: I didn’t get a telegram. I got a phone call

SS: And did it contain any four letter words?

CB: It contained two words. “Fuck you.” But that was Vinnie. It was done in a spirit of collegial admiration.

SS: He was a great man.

CB: He was a great editor. We paddled different kinds of canoes, but we knew we both had to sort of stay on top of the water, you know.

SS: One thing that fascinated me when you were in The Irish Times was, when you left, your salary as the editor was much less than your successor, Geraldine Kennedy. She insisted, correct me if I’m wrong, ‘I’m getting equal pay with the chief executive officer.’ Is that correct?

CB: It wasn’t quite as simple as that. The salaries for the top level in The Irish Times were based on what was known as the Dawson Formula in the Times of London, which was devised in 1922. And that was that the manager and the editor should have parity.

SS: Who’s that, the chief executive?

CB: Yes, the chief executive. So, that was in The Irish Times, Louis O’Neill and myself. So, the editor and the manager had parity.

It was taken to the extreme degrees in the Times of London. They were given exactly the same model of Rolls Royce, they had exactly the same model of lift to bring them to their plush offices. And they had exactly the same plush offices looking out over the Thames at Blackfriars. My office did not look out over the Liffey. I didn’t have a Rolls Royce, but I had a Jaguar. But what happened was that when I stepped down as editor, the board of The Irish Times, endeavoured to appoint Geraldine Kennedy on terms which were much less advantageous than her commercial counterpart Maeve Donovan. So she was going to be paid about €70,000 a year less than Maeve Donovan.

SS: So, this changed? You were on parity with the chief executive.

CB: Yes. Exactly.

SS: And then they tried to… With the first female?

CB: Yes, with the first female editor, they tried to have her in the job at €70,000 a year less.

SS: Well, dare I say, she was no shrinking violet as I can remember.

CB: Well I can recall that I was in Paris at a meeting of editors and I got a call from Brian Patterson, who was the chairman, to tell me this news. That they had, as he said, settled on pay and rations. And then he told me what it was. I was actually under way from Charles de Gaulle into the city and I just said to the taxi driver “bring me back”, took the next flight back to Dublin, summoned a meeting with The Irish Times Trust. We met in the Kildare Street club that night, as one would…

SS: Not The Irish Times club?

CB: I explained to them that this was unacceptable and that it was a clear breach of the principle of parity between editor and manager, and that if it wasn’t rescinded I was going to call back in the editorial committee and we would have to see how things went from there.

The Trust in fairness to them, immediately saw it. And one member of the Trust just said, ‘well, what Conor is saying makes absolute sense. You cannot have him doing the job yesterday at X and have Geraldine in doing the job next week at X minus €70,000. So, she got her parity.

SS: She did. But the first thing I would think there is, someone made that decision to try it on that she wouldn’t get parity. I’m not going to ask you to identify that person, but they know who they are.

CB: There was more than one of them. What really happened at that time was that the Trust, and I blame the unions in The Irish Times for this, blindly and stupidly, they allowed the Trust to be effectively disempowered and the company to take over. So, the commercial side of the organisation now had ascendancy over the editorial side, so there was a complete shift in the balance of power there.

And I do remember endeavouring to explain this to the unions that they would regret it. And I do remember the look of blank incomprehension on the faces of the NUJ people, they just could not get the plot.

The importance of marketing and product

SS: One thing you got great praise for was marketing. You were thought to be a great marketeer. You got the credit for making it fashionable for younger people to be seen carrying a copy of The Irish Times under their arm and call it ‘body furniture’. Is that correct?

CB: Well, it didn’t start with me. My predecessor, Douglas Gageby, was a very sharp marketeer. There are great mythologies built around Douglas that “Oh Douglas, the intuitive editor, flies by the seat of his pants, knows exactly what the people need, understands the spirit of the new Ireland.”

I knew there would be murder. I knew there would be absolute outcry from readers. This was going to be described as an intrusion into the dignity and the privacy of the dead men

Conor Brady

The reality is that Douglas’ background was in military intelligence. And if you know anything about military intelligence, you know that they do their research, they don’t allow the army to move an inch without knowing what’s on the ground ahead, what resources the enemy has and what resources you have.

Douglas was one of the very first people to use market research to find out what people wanted in The Irish Times, what they liked and what they didn’t like. But he never allowed it to be his master, and he understood very often that, in order to make the paper successful, you very often had to give people what they didn’t want. You had to force it on them. To shove it in their faces and say “you may not like this and this may disquiet you and this may discomfort you, but we’re going to give it to you.”

SS: Can you think of any example?

CB: In my particular case, I do remember the murder of the two corporals in Andersonstown, and those horrible photographs of the two men lying naked on the ground and a priest ministering to them. The decision was, do you put that on page one?

Now, I knew there would be murder. I knew there would be absolute outcry from readers. This was going to be described as an intrusion into the dignity and the privacy of the dead men. And the phones burned on the morning of publication and we were denounced on every radio station.

That that photograph had a seminal effect in advancing the peace process. And it so horrified people, and indeed so horrified influential people within Sinn Fein and the IRA that they said, “We don’t want to be remembered for this.” And I know that the talks that took place subsequently in Ardoyne in the monastery, which were the beginning of the peace process, were given a huge impetus by the pushing of that photograph.

So, that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. That a good editor has to know when to decide, “okay, this is what they want, but this is what I’m going to give them.”

SS: At that time, of course, your circulation increased under your watch I think, didn’t it?

I suspect that, a bit like railways and horses, newspapers will probably stay on even though more efficient means of transport and communication have been found.

CB: Every year. I was blessed in that sense. The economy turned around in the late 80s and then a lot of the people who had emigrated in the 80s, came back into the country during the 90s and we had kept contact with them because we were one of the very first newspapers in the world to have an online edition. So, people were living in Germany or United States, Canada, Britain, they were online to The Irish Times. They came back to Ireland in the 90s and they became readers of the print edition. So, yeah, circulation went up. I think when I became editor, the circulation was around between 75,000 and 80,000. The big issue was would we ever got past 100,000. And I think the last year that I was editor, we did 122,000 I think.

SS: Well, that was remarkable. Although paradoxically, you cut the costs on your watch too and I think jobs were lost in your time.

CB: Indeed.

SS: How that go down with the people?

CB: Oh, there was murder.

We had got to the point where costs had built up hugely. And then we got hit by this mini crisis of 2001-2002, and a huge gap opened up between income and costs. So, we had no choice but to cut the costs. I took, I think, €2 million out of the editorial operating budget. And then it was agreed that across the board in the company, we would introduce a voluntary redundancy program which was going to reduce about 300 jobs. Now it was a very generous package, and in fact, it was well oversubscribed. I think 100 journalists came out and there were over 150 applications looking for it. But the irony of it was that, I haven’t met anybody, well I met one, but only one, who ever regretted leaving, because people got a pretty good deal. But I have met many people, and some of them are still in the paper who regret staying. Because what happened was that the numbers came down. So, if you’re in a department of five people and now it’s down to three, you’re working a lot harder for the same money.

The future of newspapers

SS: Now newspaper circulations are inevitably in decline it would seem, staff numbers are being slashed in tandem with the number of pages in the paper. Which newspaper do you think in five years from now will still be published every day or every Sunday?

CB: I don’t know the answer to that. I suspect that, a bit like railways and horses, newspapers will probably stay on even though more efficient means of transport and communication have been found. People will want them for their legacy of value in the same way that people like to ride the railway.

Obviously, there are some very strong metropolitan titles and they will continue to exist. Local newspapers are also doing quite well. I’m on the board of one of the regional radio stations. We watch our competitive activity in the area and the local newspapers are actually doing very well. They’re not like they used to be. They were a licence to print money in the old days.

SS: But there’s a living to be made.

CB: And they’re hugely imaginative and inventive in the things that they do, you know?

The old days, the formula was so simple. You printed the paper, you sold space for ads, you charged people to take the paper at the street corner and as long as the two figures that you brought in exceeded your costs, you were in profit. It’s not like that anymore, obviously. So, I don’t know the answer there. I suspect that at least some of the titles that we know of will publish less frequently.

SS: The Irish Times, you are confident that it will continue on as a printed product?

CB: I would hope so. It’s not my role to offer any guarantees on that anymore.

SS: Do newspapers need billionaire sugar daddies? It didn’t work so well at the Irish Independent recently it was bought as you know by Mediahuis, a Belgian company. But Jeff Bezos of Amazon seems to be in for the long haul with The Washington Post. How do you see that working out?

CB: There is much historical evidence in favour of the benevolent philanthropic owner model. For example, The New York Times.

SS: Beaverbrook?

CB: Not necessarily Beaverbrook, but possibly Thompson at the Times, He took it through, he invested fortunes in there to maintain it at the level that it did. I guess the Ochs-Sulzberger family in The New York Times would be a very good example of it. They’ve bankrolled the newspaper. It’s also a profitable institution, a profitable business. But I think…

SS: It’s also a social cachet for people.

CB: It is, it is. I wonder how long that is going to continue. In the Victorian era and in the early 20th century, ownership of a newspaper was seen as kind of a trophy. I remember when Hugh McLaughlin and Michael Smurfit owned The Sunday Tribune. I had a lot of dealings with Michael Smurfit at that time. And I always had the sense that Smurfit actually, because O’Reilly had a newspaper that he likes to have his newspaper as well. And fair enough. He lost a bit of money on it. But I think he probably felt that it gave him that, a bit of clout, a bit of cachet for the time, you know?

Government and power

SS: People in government and people in authority tend to be indulgent of people who own and edit newspapers.

CB: Don’t pick a row with somebody who buys their printing ink by the barrel.

The power struggle between social media and traditional news media, is still in play. It’s going to be difficult to see how that actually plays out.

SS: Social media is not the favourite child that it once was.

CB: No. That pendulum is still moving forwards and back. And I think while social media can be hugely powerful, I think it’s the interaction between social media and traditional news media that actually is where the real potency is.

If you watch what happened in Britain with Brexit. You had an appalling performance by the British news media. They simply failed to challenge the issues, they failed to engage with the issues, and their mis-judgments and their misunderstandings and their dishonesties were then magnified by social media.

So, I think it was the interaction between bad newspapering, mostly, although the broadcasters did badly as well, but interaction between bad newspapering and very powerful social media that actually got the result that you did.

SS: Is there anything in AI, artificial intelligence, which you’re championing at the minute, could that help? I was thinking about robot journos.

CB: They’re there already. And there are programs which, if you put in a sentence which says: “the Prime Minister and his senior ministers yesterday met at Downing Street and agreed on a strategy to negotiate with the European Union for a trade deal.” And then you press the button, the program will actually give you 20 or 30 sentences following, drawing on the background to the story, which it knows of. And some of it is actually quite good.

SS: Well it gets the information across.

CB: It usually isn’t peppered with rampant stray apostrophes, cliches and split infinitives. So, the programs are there, but I mean you obviously couldn’t market a product on them at the moment.

SS: Now, something that fascinated me. In 2005 you declared yourself to be an Offaly nationalist, if not a separatist. You’ve widened your horizons instead I think, haven’t you?

CB: Well what do they say, “the savage loves his native shore.” Yeah, I grew up in Tullamore in Co Offaly. I still keep very close links with the town, I’ve a lot of friends there.

SS: And Brian Cowen who you spoke of very fondly.

CB: Yeah. I didn’t know Brian. He went to school in Roscrea a few years after me. But no.

I have a good few friends down there still. One of the things actually that’s helped me in my career as a journalist, and in particular in The Irish Times, was that I was able to hold my own in metropolitan circles, but I’m not in my heart a metropolitan. You know, I’m…

SS: Redneck?

CB: I’m a redneck. I’m a Biffo: A bright, intelligent fellow from Offaly.

SS: And modest.

CB: Modest as well.

SS: You’re the son of a guard, but you’re also a member of Gsoc. You were the ombudsman for six years after leaving The Irish Times. You were always very interested in and fascinated by policing. Tell me about the ‘Blue Wall’, the one thing which those of us who didn’t know so much about it. Like the scandal of Sergeant Maurice McCabe, which was a very big scandal in this country.

That has been exploited by the guards shamelessly down the decades. That ‘national security, you can’t go there.’ That’s what allowed the Heavy Gang to flourish, that’s what allowed the scandals

Conor Brady

CB: My father was one of the founding superintendents of the force back in 1923. He had been a teacher and got involved in the Irish Volunteers and didn’t really want to go back to teaching. And because he was well-educated, he was offered a superintendency in the guards, which meant that you got a nice job without having to spend too much time ploughing your way through the upper ranks.

But he died when I was 12 and I didn’t know him in adulthood. I suppose in later years, I began to wonder about him and his work and his job. And out of that developed this interest.

And when I got into The Irish Times in 1969 Donal Foley, the news editor, said to me “do you know anything about anything?” And he said “don’t say politics, everybody wants to be a political correspondent.” And I said, “well I know a bit about the guards,” and he said “great, go and find out about the guards.” It turned out the first great big garda revolt had started the 1969. The first ‘Blue Flu.’ So, I started writing in that whole area at that point and I did develop then, a lifelong interest in it. I took the history of policing in the free state as my postgraduate thesis. And then I did two histories of the guards. And when I left The Irish Times, I was offered a visiting professorship in John Jay College in New York, which is the Criminal Justice College in New York.

SS: A great honour I would have thought.

CB: After nearly 20 years being a newspaper editor, it was brilliant to just have the freedom, the academic freedom and the relaxation. They gave us a nice apartment in midtown Manhattan and it was a nice recovery process.

But then, the Fianna Fáil PD government asked me would I come in as a commissioner with Gsoc. So, I did that, as you say, for six years. I could have applied to stay on for another six, but I reckoned at that stage…

SS: Had you any clue now, knowing, as you must have done through family and so on, a little bit about the guards, about the culture that gave us what happened to Maurice McCabe?

CB: I suppose I did. I knew that the guards was an extraordinarily self-protective fortress, which did not allow of external scrutiny and which would close ranks against anybody who threatened its reputation.

SS: Is there an equivalency, perhaps not to the same extent, in other professions and other jobs?

CB: I’m sure there is. You’ve seen it in medicine, you’ve seen it in the law, you’ve seen it in military forces. Some factors in Ireland, I think, particularly reinforced that here with our national police. One is that we are unique in having a police force which is both the civil police and the national security service.

The thing we found when I was commissioner in Gsoc was that any complaint of any significance, or any allegation of any significance, that you were investigating, you were quite likely to find the shutter put down. “This is national security and therefore you couldn’t get at it.” And that has been exploited by the guards shamelessly down the decades. That ‘national security, you can’t go there.’ That’s what allowed the Heavy Gang to flourish, that’s what allowed the scandals…

SS: It’s bad management.

CB: Well, it’s not just bad management. It’s also what the politicians want. There’s no thirst among the politicians. All this stuff about accountancy and transparency and all that with the politicians, they don’t want that. And that’s what’s happening now, because the recommendations of the policing committee, from which I resigned, the policing commission, are actually rowing back significantly on the transparency and the accountability of the guards.

Like Josephine Feehily’s policing authority is being stood down, the right of the authority to appoint senior officers is being given back to the commissioner, where it was done independently by the commission. Gsoc is effectively being merged into some other undefined grouping.

SS: And the Department, I think we’ve got to look at that. Through the McCabe inquiry, I personally find, with the Department of Justice, there were questions raised that were never to be satisfactorily answered.

CB: There’s some very good people in there now. At the senior level, they’ve got people who, in a sense, were not conditioned from the Peter Berry era, where they saw themselves as a third national security force.

But there’s no doubt the political establishment does not want the national police force to be subject to the kind of scrutiny that, for example, the PSNI is subject to in Northern Ireland. Or, indeed, constabularies would be subject to on the adjoining island.

They want the guards to be left alone. They pay them very well. They look after them very well and the guards look after them.

SS: So what happens? I’m trying to think this through, a new Minister for Justice comes in, meets the Garda Commissioner, they have to have presumably a decent working relationship. The minister who lays down policy says, ‘some of the things we really want to do is A, B, C and D. And if he significantly does not mention that, he would like D, E, F prioritised, is that how things are done?

CB: It varies very, very much from minister to minister and from commissioner to commissioner.

There was a time when the commissioner was effectively the tool of the minister. And we saw that at its worst, I suppose, when Seán Doherty was Minister for Justice, and you had a commissioner and deputy commissioner in the depot who basically saw themselves as hitched to the political will of the minister and the Taoiseach, Haughey, at the time.

Certainly, there is a much stronger sense of operational independence on the part of the guards at the moment. And I believe that Drew Harris is probably a model for that. He is his own man and he’s not a prisoner of the networking within the guards.

SS: He has no baggage or history.

CB: He’s not a member of the GAA, he’s not a member of the Knights of Columbanus.

It’s all in flux at the moment. I wouldn’t be particularly optimistic about the future, I have to say. I think when this new legislation, which is in the pipeline at the moment, I think you’re going to find that the era of accountability for the guards, which was there, initiated by Michael McDowell in the 2005 Act and made real and made flesh by Josephine Feehily’s policing authority, I think we’re moving back from that.

A turn to crime (writing)

SS: I have to say I admire Ms Feehily very much.

You wrote Up with The Times, a memoir of your time as editor of The Irish Times. Then a couple of very highly regarded crime books featuring the magnificently named Sergeant Joe Swallow. Which of those books did you most enjoy writing?

CB: I probably enjoyed the first one most of all. What happened was that I had spent 30 years writing the kind of dry prose that you write in newspapers like The Irish Times. Then six years writing sort of legal stuff in the Ombudsman Commission. And I didn’t know if I had any creative stuff left in me. So, I started writing, inventing this character who was a detective sergeant in the castle in the Victorian times.

And I began to enjoy it and I got to like him. He is a very interesting character. He’s a Roman Catholic from a pub owning family in Kildare, in the Curragh. But he’s got a job in the castle as a Detectives Sergeant. He’s failed medical student. He was thrown out of medical school for drink, but he’s turned out to be quite a good detective.

SS: And great company, I presume?

CB: Good company, Not a great respecter of the rules and regulations.

SS: But gets things done?

CB: But gets things done.

He knows also that because he is a Roman Catholic, there’s the glass ceiling in the Dublin Metropolitan Police G division. The top jobs were kept for the protestants. The catholics were kept the lower ranks. So, there’s a resentment and an anger there the whole time that he’s not actually getting what he feels he’s entitled to.

I enjoyed writing it very much. I did four of them. I’m not sure there’s enough time in my life to do another one, but if I could, I’d love to get back to it.

SS: There’s one thing I insist on ask you about. Do you still have that magnificent Regency revival home on De Vesci Terrace?

CB: No, I don’t. I sold it.

SS: It’s a magnificent house.

CB: Lovely house. Lovely terrace.

I bought it back in ‘88/’89. And it was a lifelong labour of love. And we put a lot of care into it. And she unfortunately was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008 and she passed away in 2015. So, it’s a big house to be in and a lot of difficult memories. So, I put it on the market last year and it took me two years to sell it.

Eventually, Knight Frank sold it for me to a lovely young couple. They are property lawyers, interestingly enough. I bought a smaller apartment in Dún Laoghaire which is my Dublin base at the moment.

SS: We’ll have to get into this, should Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil go into coalition together, if you were writing editorials in The Irish Times at the minute, what would you be saying?

I’d love to see them come together to form one strong government, agree on a programme, solve the health thing, solve the housing thing, solve the educational stuff, put whatever reforms are necessary into criminal justice

Conor Brady

CB: I think I would be saying that they should. One of the other things that I do is I chair Tlac, the government’s top-level appointments commission. I have spent three years appointing really good people into top jobs in the civil service. And what I sense coming back again and again and again from these people, the secretaries general and the deputy secretaries, is frustration at the inability to relate to strong government. That fractured government and fragmented government means that things just can’t get done.

I’ve yet to see a bad candidate go through the Tlac process. Very bright people, highly intelligent, well-qualified, with a great sense of public service for the most part and a great love of country. And yet the place is run like a madhouse. And I think that is because the energy, the focus isn’t there in the political machine. So, I’d love to see them come together to form one strong government, agree on a programme, solve the health thing, solve the housing thing, solve the educational stuff, put whatever reforms are necessary into criminal justice. And get on with the business of advancing the equality agenda, advancing the…

SS: Build houses…

CB: Build houses, tackle the regional imbalances in the economy.

And I think all that can be done. So, I’d love to see them come together, yeah.

SS: On the other hand, of course, do you think Sinn Fein is still run from backrooms by men with a past? Does it have a future in government?

CB: Well, I don’t know. But, I dare say that the people who are at the top of the security services on both sides of the island seem to believe so.

SS: But you worked in Belfast in 1969, you were reporting on the beginnings of the Provisional IRA at that time. Do you think Gerry Adams was ever a member of the IRA?

CB: I wouldn’t doubt it. I wouldn’t have doubted it. He’s denied it constantly.

SS: Did his name ever arise as being a member of the IRA?

CB: Well, I think everybody, every journalist on the ground knew how the IRA was constructed, knew who the people were who were behind it. I had some dealings with Gerry when I was editor of the paper, but that was in his role as the leader of Sinn Fein.

Anything that I say on this thing is what one gleaned from second and third hand. I have no doubt that the IRA is gone in the sense that it is no longer a military organisation planning to import arms and to commit acts of violence.

SS: Do you think it’s still overseeing Sinn Fein?

CB: What I would say is this, I think there are a lot of bad people on this island still who shelter under the umbrella of the provisional movement. And I think we’ve seen some of it on the border, we’ve seen some of it in certain crimes which are under investigation, and I believe that shadowy land between provisional power and criminality is a bad place. It’s a bad space. I think when the Garda Commissioner speaks of that kind of subsidiarity, on the part of Sinn Fein, I think that’s what he has in mind.

SS: Tell me, do you think in your lifetime, will there ever be a united Ireland?

CB: There will. But it’s not going to be a 32 county unitary parliament with the tricorder flying over Leinster House. The Unionist population of Northern Ireland, relating to it in the same way that the separatist people of Co Cork relate to Leinster House, it is going to different.

SS: Will there be a federalist approach?

CB: Probably federalist in some form or other. Where that leaves us in terms of things like currency and taxation, given that Northern Ireland is now out of the European Union, I don’t know. But I do know that the direction of travel to me is clear. But the date of arrival and the precise point of destination, I don’t know. I don’t think anybody else does.

SS: Do you think that validates, or does Sinn Féin thing that that validates them? The fact that this is inevitably coming down the road, and they will take credit for it no doubt.

CB: I don’t know. And I’m not sure that when it happens that they will be necessarily seen as the sole authors of it. I don’t believe they will.

SS: Well, I suppose there’s something to look forward to in that. But it looks like the clock has beaten us again. Conor Brady, thank you very much for talking to me today, and indeed thank you to all who listened.

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