Brendan Hoban: Sincere apologies for few and far between           

Western People 4.7.23.

There’s another epidemic doing the rounds and it’s in danger of becoming a pandemic, though its effects are thankfully less related to health than to worldly success and its many daughters – including reputation, career and money.

I mean, of course, the present outbreak of apologies stretching across a broad spectrum from a mere ‘apology’ to those who ‘unreservedly apologise’ and  ‘wholeheartedly apologise’ to apologies that stretch to cover every possible predictable scenario – personal, political and legal.   

Take a few recent examples.

Ryan Tubridy, the talented RTÉ presenter of Radio One’s The Ryan Tubridy Show and until recently RTÉ television’s Late Late Show, has emerged as the recipient of about €345,000 in hidden payments since 2017. Famously, as his loyal listeners will know, Tubridy is ‘not good at maths’ and initially suggested that he hadn’t noticed how his bank account had increased by the addition of what most people would regard as significant sums of money.

The result was that Tubridy’s annual earnings, as publicly disclosed by RTÉ, didn’t reflect the hidden payments so the inference was that RTÉ’s highest earner took a bigger pay-cut than he did.

Tubridy’s first reaction was unapologetic – it was all RTÉ’s fault . . he himself couldn’t shed any light on why it happened . . . it was a matter for RTÉ and he couldn’t answer for their mistakes.  

Two days later, Tubridy distanced himself from his ‘couldn’t shed any light’ comment by admitting that he knew the figures released by RTÉ were inaccurate but that he never questioned them or sought to correct them. He admitted too that he should have questioned the figures at the time. He went on to accept responsibility for his failure to do so and to ‘apologise unreservedly’. He continued: ‘At the centre of all of this is trust’ ­– trust  of his colleagues and his listeners – ‘and to them I wholeheartedly apologise for my error of judgement’.

Whether Tubridy’s change of mind was the result of being dropped from his radio programme – which may have underlined the possible implications for his future career – with no indication as to when or even if he might be reinstated, only he can tell. The more compelling result of the developing controversy is to compromise RTÉ’s reputation not least because it sets in relief the RTÉ slogan – ‘Trust is the cornerstone of RTÉ’ – at a time when debate and analysis in the media can be compromised by untruths. Whatever apologies are deemed necessary before the fall-out from this controversy is contained (if it can be contained), will in time become clear. Dee Forbes, the director-general of RTÉ has resigned and she too apologised as  ‘deeply sorry for what happened’.

In an unrelated matter, President Michael D. Higgins has offered what has been called an ‘unprecedented apology’ to Professor Louise Richardson, the Oxford University and Harvard academic who is chairing the government’s Forums on International Security Policy. Mr Higgins sneered at Ms Richardson’s award as Dame of the British Empire as ‘a person with a very large DBE – Dame of the British Empire’.

More accurately the apology might be termed ‘half-hearted’ as well as unprecedented as the president sought retrospectively to lighten the insult by representing it as ‘a throw-away’ remark. The obvious and unvarnished truth is that our esteemed president, for whom I have the greatest respect and for whom I voted twice in presidential elections, uncharacteristically and spectacularly lost the run of himself in trenchantly criticising the dangerous path the government was taking.  

A further truth is that Mr Higgins, after 12 years in office surfing the narrow border of his constitutional obligations (and apparently, as Pat Leahy suggested in The Irish Times, having enjoyed ‘testing the line’) suddenly lost his footing and found himself clambering for oxygen in the water.

In an extraordinary finger-wagging address described as ‘contemptuous, cranky and personal’, our president – so often sure-footed, respectful and a unifying force in society – spoke as if from an ex cathedra, infallible podium in the Phoenix Park he had lost his previous sure sense of the limits of his office.

At a time when efforts are being made to build relationships with unionism, the president’s interview with the Business Post was a PR disaster, effectively undermining North-South relations and compounding his refusal to attend an event in Armagh, organised by churches in the North to mark the centenary of the foundation of Northern Ireland. It was an outrageous break from the sterling efforts of his predecessors, Mary McAleese and Mary Robinson in building bridges in the North.

The ‘dangerous drift’ in Ireland’s established policy of military neutrality, for which the president so imprudently criticised the government ironically could be presented as a ‘dangerous drift’ of a presidency losing its way. With the reluctance of politicians quietly seething with rage at the most popular politician in Ireland losing his touch of the limits of his office, the question now is, who will protect Michael D. from himself?  

Separately again, there was another apology, this time by Dave Fanning, the music journalist, who was criticised for insensitive remarks made on Claire Byrne’s radio show about the widely admired singer and raconteur, Christy Dignam, who died recently. Although Claire Byrne had already apologised, Fanning felt his comments didn’t deserve the criticism that followed. But when he looked at them again he found them ‘incredibly ill-timed and in poor taste’ and abjectly apologised for them.

Whereas the Tubridy and Forbes apologies have the feel of been written in the company of legal experts and the Higgins apology losing  much of its import by his effort to waive its significance away as merely ‘a throwaway remark’, the Fanning apology to Dignam’s family has the smell of authenticity. It was a model of what a real ‘apology’ felt like.

Real apologies happen when those who apologise are genuinely sorry. The rest are self-serving and most people can smell the inauthenticity a mile away.