Sunday Times asks RTE to explain 'lack of alarm' over Excess Deaths

Montrose scandal sinks credibility to all-time low

Shortly after 10.15am on March 11 2020 presenter Ryan Tubridy announced the arrival of a ‘New World Order’ on his RTE radio show. This was just a few days before the country entered its ‘flatten the curve’ lockdown that was predicted to last two weeks. Tubridy used the monologue section of his morning radio show to herald the arrival of a strange new era.

“The virus is pushing us into a New World Order,” he said.

Later the same day, RTE broadcast news of the first covid death in Ireland, via Health Correspondent Fergal Bowers. Chief Medical Officer of the time Tony Holohan called on the media to ‘respect the family’s privacy.’

“It will take all of us, collectively to succeed. Please continue to follow public health advice," Holohan said.

What followed effectively amounts to a period of misinformation and censorship so absolute and grotesque that Irish journalism may never recover.

Secret payments to Ryan Tubridy pale into insignificance when one considers the widespread and traumatic damage inflicted by media fear-mongering, masks, lockdowns, the use of trial phase covid 19 vaccines and discriminatory vaccine passports.

Yesterday an editorial in the Irish edition of the Sunday Times newspaper posed some pertinent questions:

The editorial will be of specific interest to those punished by the prevailing narrative set by the national broadcaster and pushed relentlessly by certain presenters.

“It is notable that Ireland’s excess death rate has lately risen sharply above pandemic levels…The reasons for this deterioration are unclear.”

“It is perplexing that the HSE and RTE have given so little attention to it. There was public alarm when covid initially threatened to overwhelm our hospitals. But how is the utter absence of alarm at our elevated excess death rate today to be explained?”

The ST article questions the use of masks, the cost of lockdown to younger generations and notes that in its 2019 pandemic preparedness report the World Health Organisation ‘did not mention the word lockdown once.’

It goes on to question the treatment of Dr Martin Feeley, forced to resign as clinical director of the Dublin Midlands Hospital Group and asks if his treatment was justifiable in ‘a democratic state whose constitution permits its citizens to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority?’

It appears that, as the RTE scandal wipes out the last remnants of public trust in its output, members of the media are beginning to feel uncomfortable.

What's behind Irish media silence on vaccine harm?

While yesterday’s Sunday Times editorial appears on page 18, the paper’s front page offers an investigation into the covert payments made to Tubridy. The article names the outfit behind the ‘barter mechanism’ used to funnel €150,000 to the former Late Late Show host as British media firm Astus. According to the Sunday Times, Tubridy’s agent Noel Kelly of NK Managament was instructed to send invoices directly to Astus.

Noel Kelly acts as an agent to Ryan Tubridy, Claire Byrne, Joe Duffy, Pat Kenny, Dr Ciara Kelly, Matt Cooper and Maia Dunphy, among others. The Sunday Times article states:

“The payments were not treated in a normal fashion by RTE. Instead Kelly was instructed to create invoices which covered the years 2021 and 2022. The invoices, Kelly was told, were not to be made out to RTE but to be addressed to Astus, a London media company.”

“Tubridy’s name was not included on the paperwork as per RTE’s  instruction to Kelly.”

Sunday Times reporters John Mooney and Beau Donnelly note the actual cost to RTE of Tubridy’s €150,000 payment was €230,760 ‘inclusive of fees incurred through the barter account service.’

Does this mean Astus earned upwards of €80,000 from this transaction?

Tubridy was absent from his radio show on Thursday and Friday last week, as was his RTE colleague, Claire Byrne. The radio presenter was dubbed ‘Scare Byrne’ on social media channels during Covid for the unrelenting fear-mongering she visited upon listeners to her morning radio slot.

While Tubridy informed listeners back on March 11 2020 that ‘handshakes are out lads,’ while alluding to the ‘stigma’ of being sick, by the end of the month Byrne was inexplicably broadcasting from what she claimed to be her garden shed in Bray, Co Wicklow.

Playing out her positive PCR test in public, Byrne spoke repeatedly of a curious emotional response.

“Then I got the result and I can’t tell you what that was like. It was so shocking. Then I went into guilt mode. Because I felt, ‘how many people have I given this to?”

After she’d ‘been through the worst,’ Byrne was still musing upon her apparent misconduct.

“I still feel quite guilty about it but I suppose many of us are going to go through that experience and it is all part of it,” Byrne said.

Byrne’s shed broadcast came under scrutiny last April, following the posing of a question by broadcaster and Substack publisher, Aisling O’Loughlin and the emergence of the Twitter hashtag #Shedgate. O’Loughlin asked if the show was in fact broadcast from Byrne’s garden shed?

O’Loughlin’s article prompts a follow up question - why broadcast from a shed?

Psychologically, #Shedgate pushed a crucial trajectory of the covid phenomenon, that the ill and the elderly be cast into isolation, effectively banished.

The subconscious message of Byrne’s broadcasting from her shed attached connotations of heroism to those that completed the punishment foisted upon them for contracting covid (isolation), which in turn was projected in the form of derision onto those that refused to partake in such theatrics.

In terms of reportage, Claire Byrne had repeated access to politicians, medics, ‘experts’ and advisors together with a team of researchers preparing her show. Yet, she appeared to abandon all impartiality on the topic of covid, betraying journalistic integrity by accepting outright falsehoods as fact on a regular basis. Why?

What of the disastrous mocking of anyone that dared question the accepted narrative which in effect, left our most vulnerable members of society at the mercy of inhumane HSE policy?

Reports last week revealed that despite vaginal bleeding and infections, nursing home residents making allegations of rape were not believed.

So what exactly was the purpose of the prominent hashtag #protecttheelderly?

Byrne’s shed broadcast arguably set the tone early for the vaccine pass and the resulting discrimination against the unvaccinated that followed in 2021. The family of footballer Roy Butler (23), who died five days post Janssen vaccine in August 2021, told this Substack that part of Roy’s reasoning for taking a vaccine he didn’t need or want, was to gain access to the gym.

RTE’s reportage during covid becomes particularly questionable when viewed through the lens of the Broadcasting Act, Section 42 which states:

(a) that all news broadcast by a broadcaster is reported and presented in an objective and impartial manner and without any expression of the broadcaster’s own views,

(b) that the broadcast treatment of current affairs, including matters which are either of public controversy or the subject of current public debate, is fair to all interests concerned and that the broadcast matter is presented in an objective and impartial manner and without any expression of the broadcaster’s own views.

There is a reason Broadcasting Codes and Standards exist. Actions have consequences. But while shady deals involving huge salaries attract plenty of column inches, reportage on the human fall out remains strangely stifled. Who is there to speak for the families torn apart over disagreement on vaccines? Those that took their own lives in fear or desperation? The vaccine injured whose lives have been destroyed? The elderly that died alone and bewildered? What of those that buried loved ones under draconian covid measures? The doctors and medical personnel under investigation by the medical council? Where is the official alarm over excess deaths?

And why, as recently as last week, do newspapers decline to publish reports on a medical inquest concerning the death of a 14 year old boy from Achill Island post Pfizer vaccine?

Where is the covid inquiry called for by Coroner Pat O’Connor following the inquest into the death of Sally Maaz (17) in Co Mayo back in April 2022?

All the while, I as a reporter and former contributor to RTE, have lost all income and appear to be blacklisted, for simply asking questions. Did they think I would just disappear?

How utterly ironic that yesterday’s Sunday Times editorial is placed on the same page as an article on the hate crime bill from Justice Minister Helen McEntee with the strapline ‘This legislation aims to protect the most vulnerable, not stifle free speech.’

Minister McEntee writes:

“Debate is the lifeblood of a modern liberal democracy. But intimidation, persecution and setting people against others simply because of who they are have no place in our society.”

*Warm thanks to those that support of this work, it is much appreciated.

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Tubridy's RTE Radio broadcast March 11 2020 (16 mins in)

Sunday Gospel June 25 2023 Matthew 10:26

Do not be afraid. For everything that is now covered will be uncovered, and everything now hidden will be made clear.