hello, i'm sean murray, and this is the conversation where we take an alternative look at political events and current affairs through annary slens. in this show we hope to pick, probe, investigate and uncover the stories that you want to hear, we go where mainstream won't go. this week we talked to a small bond of investigative journalists. that

have taken ireland by storm, in a country where journalism has sustained track record and upholding the establishment status quo, are we now seeing the unraveling of decades old marriage of convenience, but before i speak to my next guest, let's get a quick overview on this week's topic.

so let's introduce today's guests. joining me today is on mcneal, paulie doil and roman shorthall from the titch. hi guys, welcome to the show. thanks for having us. so first of all, roman, i could ask you for the audience of sake, what is the ditch? um, the ditch, i suppose, is an online investigative. uh journalism website, um, we set up about three years ago, i suppose we felt that there was a gap in the market for um, maybe a bit more focus on investigative journalism, and we didn't really know exactly um, you know, how we were going to go about it, but we knew that we wanted to to focus uh soly on vestigative journalism, and i mean we we basically just we started off, um you know

kind of digging into public registers and land registry records and stuff like that and you know that that seems to be like our uh it's still our bread and butter um and that's kind of what we've been focusing on for uh yeah nearly three years now and whose idea was it to to come together? well i had i had worked as a journalist kind of on and off over the last 10 years or so and um i'd worked up this was god, it's going back, it was during covid, story about leader leaking document to one of his friends in doctors union um story that was originally published by village magazine and i would have worked on that and it was kind of from that then i've been talking to roman away bit on and off just kind of um just kind of phone calls and texts about about that story first of all and then roman had been doing bit of he'd

been doing a bit of journalism himself in the background like he comes from legal background himself but he had he worked in a few other stories in the background and it was partly just from just from these chats and kind of talking about what we do what we thought the game was missing and that you know that we thought that there wasn't a left-wing use outlet that kind of focused on things like like land deals and property hold. things and suppose from some of our stuff like undeclared properties all the rest and um we kind of thought yeah fuck it why not let's go and give it a go and you know it was kind of i'd say we would have spoken on and off maybe might have been two or three months maybe or so and we've been gathering things and building things together and then roman had come across it was a lovely story now i have to say like we launched yeah as roman said um was it march or april yeah three years ago and roman had come across it

was during covid and michal martin, the most decent man in ireland, as we all know, had you know, during a time when there were very strict prohibitions on the kind of events you could... old and attend he attended a prohibited event down in cork that was just so happened to be held in honor of his father uh patty the champ martin who was an amateur boxer and roman came across this video of meal martin attending this event and and he came across in this video he was telling an attending garda to go and take her mask off for a photo opportunity you know and we just kind of thought well like it's great stuff and and actually funny enough to go to roman's point about yeah how there wasn't uh how we felt that there wasn't a whole lot of adversarial or confrontational journalism the cork echo had actually covered this and like go no like isn't mail martin great and we were kind of like really you know and um and

look myself and roman we kind of talked about this since you know and that was the first story that we published and it did kind of come from you know having spoken about it all for whatever two or three months and got to the point where we just said right, we have to go and do this now and then keep on doing it, you know, we felt we had to launch with a big story and i think that kind of story was the only kind of story that we could launch on, do think like the irish times or the irish independent had published that story, i think mail martin would have been in serious serious danger, we kind of you know we kind of we're hurt a little bit by the fact that you know people going who the fuck are the ditch like you know. since then yeah we kind of we just kept on at it and um kind of started off maybe story week or so and then we kind of ramped it up a we bit and now pauly's come on board the last half year or so like so hopefully only bigger and better things that's it then speaking to yourself

paulie mean why why is this work important? the short answer is that um there was a lack of stories in the irish media identifying wrong doing on the... part of people in positions of power and authority, right? and i was quite struck by you know how successful the guys had been, just the two of them, um, as you know, holding people to account, identifying wrong doing, in opposition to what the irish media, for the most part does and uh, has historically done, which is kind of um, run stories about politics that are focused on personalities, or rely on government sources to kind of leak them story, so the narrative is kind of shaped a certain way, and so i think it's important. so that there are outlets out there that kind of hold people to account and the run these kinds of stories and um yeah and and has it been because i know when you when you crack that we world it's a seam and i've seen it in film how's the relationship between the legs of yourselves and and others in journalism

say say for example others that would have been uh comfortable with the the status quo um i think they're just kind of confused and vaguely annoyed by the emergence of um the ditch, there seems to be very much in attitude um towards the ditch that we're not somehow legitimate, right? um, you'll run stories and the press will ignore them, and i think if they had another broad broadsheet had run them, they'd all end up kind of running them, if that if that makes sense, um, sometimes um, the work that we do is acknowledged, and other times it isn't, it seems to be kind of random in a in a way, you know, i've like, i've got to say in that, like i kind of like it when you get you know a little bit of love and recognition from an unexpected source you know like where you know sometimes yeah i would agree with lot of what paulie has said where there yeah there are mainstream journalists who don't like us or don't recognize us whatever and there are

reasons for that you know but um do i found that um during the was it was it summer or was it kind of late spring when we had published all these stories about collins, mel martin gets up on the doll, goes in a diatrie accuses us of being rushian assets, etc., etc., etc., and you know, i was, i was kind of surprised by, i went to did an interview with rte after that, and it was kind of like, it was guy called justin murphy, um, who, you know, i kind of knew that i was kind of getting seven for like, which is fine, but like, he kind of used the opportunity to hold me to account and... going to go buse, oh yeah, buse me and martin said that we're a political organization, that you know we're not a, you know, a conventional journalistic outlet, you know, and i had to kind of answer for that, you know, whereas if yeah, if if it was a mainstream journalist, it would be, you know, it would be a, you know, a grave attack on

the press and certainly some of the reaction post that attack on us by michal martin was kind of yeah, similar to what your man justin murphy was like, but i have to say uh, very much respected um shane ross in his sunday independent column that that weekend um he he called it out for what it was you called. out for attack on the press, attack on the media, he also, if i recall correctly, he compared me hal martin's ready to be more fitting of someone like putin, you know, in that it was attack on the free press, so i always enjoy that when, look, i wouldn't consider myself liberal myself, but i think when you do have sometimes you people who actually abide by liberal principles like shane ross, like i kind of... did appreciate that, a good old sunday independent day, i'm sure some of you haven't had the misfortune have been called a

troubles nacrphiliact by the sunday independent, who was that in the, but that's for another day, was that rde? isn't isn't a political organization though, it's completely apolitical and they just stick to the facts and all that kind of thing, if i was a political journalist, i would be asking myself, why i considered to be some sort of a political operator, yeah, well it's not political to uphold a status quo, but it is political to challenge it, yeah? and meal martin wouldn't actually repeat his what he said outside of the doll as well crucially no, yeah, that is crucial, we have to we have to give credit though to the establishment media for doing a great job of holding us to account, they might they might not want to hold the subjects of our stories to account the people with actual power, but yeah they've they they they've certainly tried to hold us to account, it seems we we only kind of get the phone call um you know from rte or or um other establishment media. organizations when we're in trouble or they think we're in trouble that's when they want to talk to usse you know but when we've a big

story you know and someone else is in trouble it you know they don't really want to hear from us that's partful the courses your well known i roman uh on just getting back to yourself you had written recently written a piece for red roof on the the heat speech bill do you want to tell us a bit about that yeah look mean i just think it's a terrible piece of legislation for so many reasons um it's a proposed hate speech um act that is, it's working its way through the aractus at the moment, it's it's it's gone through the doll and it's to come before the shaned, it's um, what can you say about it, it's you know it's it's in incredibly far reaching it effectively, um the parts that i'd be most worried about are the the powers that it would give the gardi in investigating so... called hate offenses and the power that the that the guards will have for investigation

of people's people's devices and um and homes and part of this bill you aims to combat transphobic hate crime right and as part of that it would empower the guardy to investigate these potential crimes but you know the guards an organization that shelved um internal gender policy, because in the words of um, antonette cunningham who is uh, she's a representative of one of the guardia unions, like she said that lot of the guards don't know about this kind of thing, like that you know under this policy, you know uh guards would have been possibly subject um to disciplinary measures if they misgendered their colleagues, and the guards say oh no we can't do this like so these are the guys that we're supposedly looking to combat these crimes, and i kind of find that the bit that

i found mo that that i continue to find most frustrating about it is the fact that the loudest opponents of this bill are generally from the right, and these are people who i i said and i said um in the piece i road for that, these are these are people who have been in paroxisms of ' over over phrases like from the river to the sea uh palestine will be free you know um these people think that that chance is beyond the pale and they've been in hysterics over that but now they're um now they're opposing this bill on the grounds of they as they would say free speech that's another kind of one that grinds my gears away but always kind of found when irish people talk about free speech that to me is a bit of an americanism like always think of freedom of express but anyway, i also just think that i think that the left or the or the nominal left or the broad left,

whatever you want to call it, has kind of seated a lot of grounds to the rights in opposing this bill, and i think it's kind of wild in a country with our history of censorship, on you, on the on the on the censorship of even published discussion about abortion, and then particularly with section 31, which i kind of do think that... "a lot of what you've been saying and what paul and roman have have been saying about this kind of um, whatever you want to call it, the toothlessness or kind of an impotance of the irish." establishment media, i think it's a legacy of section 31 where you know when we say section 31 first introduced in um, i think it was 1960 in the broadcasting act and then it was later in the 70s where measures were introduced to ban republicans from the air waves um effectively there were different ministers involved you but one minister who

certainly came down hard um and certainly used these measures um uh quite prodigiously was connor cruz o'brian a man who later joined the uk unionist party like um but you could see like throughout the course of section 31 you know there are kind of there were little whatever you want to call it you know uh pockets of resistance to it where i think there was there was one reporter who interviewed sean mcchifan and he interviewed him and then just read a trans script of what he had said, so technically sean mcchifan wasn't broadcast over the airwaves, this drove government mad, like you and then they kind of clamped down on it again, the end result of this was government telling journalists what they can and can't publish, and like yeah they were acts of resistance along the way, but broadly speaking these

guys just said oh yeah cool, like if if connor cruise brian says we shouldn't interview these guys, i'm going to go with and people get up on their high horse about this term, but mean if you can't call connor cruz o'brien a west brith, who can you call? when he was just like, so to me it's just kind of crazy that you know anyone who considers themselves broadly progressive could support this build, but then but then you'll see people then like clare burn um who's an rte presenter uh she was questioning um she was interviewing um liam harrick from the... iris council for civil liberties and you know one of the lines of questioning that she put to him was, oh well, donald trump junior and elon musk oppose this, are you happy to be in their corner, and it's just like, i don't know, it's just like is that the extent of of your feelings on this, that like all right, well these bad people are opposing it, we better oppose it too, just

kind of yeah, i mean like i think yeah, what i would like to see would be you know more... aggressive, liberal, left, socialist opposition to the bill, because it's it's a terrible piece of legislation anyway, but it's particularly bad in a country like ireland. so getting to the meet on the bones, um, start with you, pauly, what, uh, for the audience is sick, tell us about some of the the big catches that you've had, um, well, big story that we had this year was that uh, leo veradger had misled sipo when they had. asked him about um number of donations that were undeclared now to explain that so under the law if you receive donation from an individual that's or company over 600 euro you have to declare it and that donation cannot exceed um right so cipo wrote to him in 2019 and they saidlem bought a table fundraiser event that you uh that you ran um

we found that it wasn't declared so can you please explain that for ad'? had been table, so therefore it didn't count as reimbursed by the individuals who are at the donation exceeding , and none of it had to be um, none of it had to be declared because there were 200 europes, um, sipo then checked with edelman and they said, is this what happened here? eleman wrote back and said, no, actually, that's not what happened, um, and that then brought something that leo verradker had said explaining a donation from them in 2022, into question as well, um, there were other undeclared donations from 2018 this that year, one of them was from uh barrister, one of them was from the attorney general, well the now attorney general rossa faning, and the other one was from centric health right, um, and they asked, they wrote sipo wrote to leo saying, are you satisfied, he given the same explanation for you, these

other donations saying they were all reimbursed, so i didn't have to declare them, they'd written to him saying, can you explain one why? are contradicting you and to you know are you are you satisfied that the other this explanation you know accounts for what's happened with these other donations and he just ignored them right buse leov doesn't have to answer questions to anyone apparently he doesn't have to so he just refused to as well and sippo as well which is completely toothless right so he just said he just instead of engaging with them and accounting for what he done he was just like no i'm not going to answer and then they wrote to him again and um we did a story on it and he uh we asked him about it and leo varadker then uh released a statement to her saying i can confirm that i am not under investigation by sipo which was was very, i think he was trying to get get off a kind of a technical term because it was like inquiry and maybe not technically investigation or something like that, we we actually never said he was

under investigation, we were careful with the language because of how the the legislation is worded and we said that it was um we use words like probe and everything, sippo is investigating which is the language that the mainstream press use whenever sipple stick an or into shin faine's business it's always oh sipple is invested. so but can't say about this as well, that was one of the instances where the the media did pick it up and they ran with the headline, leoveradker confirms that he is not under investigation by so, and there was also one journalist who's quite well known um who contacted us kind of asking for what we had to back up you now what was what we said in the story, so uh we kind of made sure that the that we sent it to him and um he didn't do anything with it, so i'm convinced that it was a uh fact finding mission, sounds like it, and yourself, roman, uh, what would you say would be one of the

biggest stories that you have worked on? um, i'd say probably my favorite story last year, it was the the nile collins story that we did, so nile collins is a junior minister, um, he's the, he's the minister of state for further education, and the first... story that we did, i think was at the beginning of last year related to a planning application that he had made a star planning application and uh basically on that planning application he lied and said that he was living with his parents in order to circumvent um planning rules, very strict planning rules relating to one half dwellings, he wanted to build a one half dwelling in limrick where he's from ' "and the problem was he already owned a house so he didn't have a housing need, so in order to get around that, as i said, he he basically just lied, and he said he was, he

was living with his parents, he didn't own any property, and uh, he got planning permission to build that house, i mean, some people would say um, you know, that there's uh, and it is quite controversial, you know, the one-off housing rules, they still exist, um, and lot of people would say..." that you know they're problematic and i think a lot of people would um tell fibs on the applications to kind of get around these things um but you know this guy is a law maker and lot of people who who do things like that would have to face consequences for it so we ran that story and i guess he kind of managed to wesel his way out of it um and the media kind of ran with uh whatever he was saying he came into the... doll and gave a statement and you know, i think he thought that was the end of it, and we did a little bit more digging, and it turned out that he um, his wife had

purchased a parcel of land in limerick that was owned by the council, and a month before the council voted to sell that piece of land, um, his wife had written in to the council and said, i want to buy this piece of land, um, and uh he voted, he was one of the people that voted, his uh, phenofoil colleagues proposed the motion a council meeting, he was a counselor at the time, and um, they voted to sell the piece of land, which is wife then bought, and um, basically no consequences, he's still a minister, there's there is guarden investigation into it, uh, well, it's not, i believe it's not an invest. igation stage, they've said that they're doing a sculping exercise to see if any um legislation was broken, which it seems that might have been the the local government act,

which states you have to recuse yourself, when you've a potential beneficial interest, and there's also a complaint made to the standards and public office commission, but he's still junior minister for for further. and there were lot of other stories that we did um on on nikollins, lot of you know i would say dodgy dealings um you know relating to himself and um yeah he hasn't really had to properly account for any of it you know and yourself on would you view one of your bigger stories? yeah i think like i got a bit of crack out of the robert troy stories again similar um, he's another ex pienfall junior minister who, that was back when it was just myself and roman, it was 1 august and... "the

doll wasn't in session at the time, which, and this is another thing to get back to irish media, you know, when this happens, you know, political correspondents will call it silly season, because there's nothing to write about, because because government departments, td's, ministers aren't sending press releases, like things are still happening, you know, but just because you're not getting spoonfed stories, like, which is why like typically in august, certainly down south." there was a run of years there where it was always the same thing, there were there be stories about out of control seagles every august like clockwork like and you'd have like some headbanger senator you know going like oh the seagles are out of control in dublin like we have to do something about this like this is like like every year like you know so um yeah we fight into we covered robert troy before and you know he was the

guy to you know to go back to what we were and about you know what the ditch, our aspirations for it and all the rest. we had first run stories about um, his property holdings, you's a multi property landlord, making a bomb off student accomodation down in dublin, uh, we'd already publish stories like that where you know you get some reaction to those kind of stories, people go and like, oh well, and fair play to him, like kind of like, yeah, fine, like lots of other people had a problem with it, you know, and... and what i find very interesting about the robert troy series of stories was before we went before we went to publish basically basically roman had found that he had sold property to local authority and when you do that you have to declare it and he hadn't done that so we found this out thought it was good you know and we just started speaking to people you know and um funny enough yeah we

find out that "it wasn't just, it wasn't just one time he'd done it, but he done it a second time with a different local authority, you know, so like, all right, okay, this is this is pretty good, yeah, yeah, and we published the first story, and yeah, the media down tools, they were writing about out of control, seagles, etc., etc., do the first story, and um, funny enough, actually, i was, um, i was uh, i was back home and..." 'um my mom was listening to philip out and for about him, he had he had robert troy on, and he'll hardly ask about that story like you, and but right enough, yeah, fair play to phillip, he asked him, and robert had some answer for it, and she like, all right, okay, sweet, and a day or two later we did the second story then, you know, and um, then yeah, it starts kind of blowing up, like starts getting a little bit of heat and twitter and it's all good crack and all the rest, and like all the

way throughout this, he robert troy wouldn't speak to us, like we were asking him for comment and we got into this kind of um, we got into this kind of uh, like this kind of pattern of also asking him for comment for story, him ignoring us publishing a story and then he'd have to go to um to the mainstream press then and then go, oh actually what happened here is this, that the other, you know, and and god, i think it must have been over the course of a week, and and this is yeah, "the one thing that to take it back to his party leader, mil martin who said that that we're a political organization that were hellbent and taken down the government that were you know implying that were russian assets, all that kind of stuff. one thing that michel martin and his kind can't seem to grapple with is that like over the course of that week the number of phone calls, both roman and i were receiving from people in his

constituency, there was one guy actually uh called us up and he said it was the best thing ever happened to wes me he's like you know mean you know like quite regularly we'll do story about you know state body or a public figure and you know you'll get few calls afterwards or few messages but like robert troy and nile collins actually as well you know the neil collins one as well was funny was you know i mean the first story um or... sorry, it wasn't the first story, there was another story about um, a property deal, um, that was an anonymous email, you know, from someone who had been trying their best to have this story told you, by anyone, you know, and people didn't want to know about it, you know, and like, look, i'll try to be as objective as possible about it, like you, even just like, we publish those stories, actually funny enough, i think the doll wasn't sitting either that time, so...