‘Regina Doherty, Catherine Kelly and the dinner date that never was’ by Izzykamikaze

Catherine Kelly, the social media user recently questioned at Dublin Airport regarding her online references to Minister Regina Doherty, was mentioned jokingly by the Minister in an RTE radio interview broadcast in May 2016. Claiming to have **“a closer relationship with some of these people on Twitter than I have with some of my family members,” a relaxed-sounding Ms Doherty goes on to say “I’m nearly close to inviting some lady from New York to go to dinner with me…every second tweet that comes out of her account is about me, which is flattering in one way.”

The remarks were widely understood, in the small world of Irish political Twitter, to refer to Catherine Kelly and a Twitter search for her handle “@sanepolitico dinner” will display numerous jocular tweets at the time, from people wondering about the dinner date arrangements. Sadly, Ms Doherty appears later to have settled on a more heavy handed approach, culminating in the odd airport encounter that has lately received so much attention.

The interview, on RTE’s “Saturday with Claire Byrne”programme, took place on the day when Ms Doherty had published a piece in the Independent, explaining the 2009 collapse of her indebted company Enhanced Solutions, which was not properly wound up until an unspecified date following her election to the Dail in 2011. The interview is still available on the RTE website but as such pages have an unfortunate habit of disappearing when attention is drawn to them, I’ve recorded a back up and a SoundCloud link to this is available below.

https://soundcloud.com/user-903931697/rdjaacktdm16

The social media loving public has become accustomed to political touchiness about politicians’ newfound vulnerability to uncensored commentary, so nobody will be surprised that Ms Doherty refers several times to negative comments on social media during the interview. “My Social Media Hell” stories by aggrieved politicians had been a staple of 2014 and 2015 and were regularly used to boost sympathy at times when controversial decisions were being made. Such stories waned somewhat in the first half of 2016 however, following the revelation that Westminster Tory MP, Lucy Allan, had actually fabricated a widely publicised “death threat” in the wake of her vote to support air strikes in Syria.

Taking place, as it was, during this lull, Ms Doherty makes no extravagant claims of “harassment” in the Claire Byrne interview. In fact, she appears to accept that social media attention is a hazard of her chosen profession and likely to increase when one is appointed to more prominent positions. At about the 2 minute mark, she raises social media comments. The interviewer, Claire Byrne remarks “You can ignore all of that stuff,” to which Ms Doherty replies “I have done…until 2 weeks ago when I was lucky enough to be made Chief Whip. The interactions went through the roof.” It’s clear that, at this point, Ms Doherty sees the attention she’s receiving on social media (including @sanepolitico’s tweets that she later refers to so jocularly) as a result, not of any malice, but of her increasing prominence in national politics. Ms Doherty has since then been appointed as Minister for Employment and Social Protection, in control of an enormous budget and exhibiting, so far, a disproportionate interest in the minute amount of fraud existing among welfare claimants.One would assume “interactions” may also have increased.

Continuing in this realistic vein about the ire she’s receiving on social media and the probable reasons for it. Ms Doherty (at about the 3 minute mark) says she wouldn’t want people thinking that perhaps she did have something to hide “because I wouldn’t answer questions from The Mail on Sunday.” A week earlier, Ms Doherty had evaded questioning by The Mail on Sunday on the contrast between the write off of some her business debts and her widely publicised remarks to struggling voters that their Irish Water bills “would not magically disappear.” 

(The story is not available online, but a screenshot appears below.)

At 3:25 Ms Doherty describes attacks on her as ”politically motivated, like nobody’s attacking me personally to say I have a big nose,“ however she appears to mean this in the sense of political anger related to austerity and later specifically rejects the notion that any political party is orchestrating a campaign against her. Invited to expand on the “politically motivated” claim to the other studio guests ( Darragh O’Brien FF and Eoin O’Broin SF) she responds “Well, I don’t think it’s anything to do with them…I certainly don’t think there’s any…political party saying ‘let’s go get Regina Doherty,’ I don’t think I’m that important.”

This latter observation is particularly interesting, given that the central plank of the behind-the-scenes smear campaign currently targeting Catherine Kelly is that Regina Doherty is being unfairly targeted as a result of “having exposed IRA sex abusers.” Given that Ms Doherty’s first claim in the Dail on this matter was in November 2014, it’s curious that she herself denied the existence of any such campaign a full 18 months later in May 2016 and certainly did not see Catherine Kelly’s tweets in that light, when she light-heartedly joked about inviting her to dinner.

Apart from this sinister IRA conspiracy theory, debunked a year ago by Ms Doherty herself, the only substantial allegation about Catherine Kelly is that she has simply tweeted “too often” about Ms Doherty, using her Twitter tag @Reginado.  Fresh from FG’s recent disastrous attempt to make Ireland the first democracy to legally redefine protest as “false imprisonment,” are we now to be the first non-dictatorship to criminalise social media comment on politicians? A 2016 survey found that the tag @RealDonaldTrump was being used 450,000 times per day (I suspect the number may have increased in the meantime.) Should the authors of those 450,000 tweets, many of them “persistent offenders,” be pursued now for harassing him? Or are they politically engaged “netizens”, exercising their democratic right to comment on public affairs? (The behind-the-scenes campaign against Catherine Kelly is interesting, involving as it does a number of politicos and journalists with previous form in this area. I hope to return to it on a future occasion.)

Like many other politicians, there is a certain inconsistency in Ms Doherty’s accounts of her social media persecution, with a different spin given to the story, according to the prevailing winds of the time. Hopefully the mainstream media is more alert now to the anti-free speech agenda at play here and some journalists may now be looking a little more closely at the various shifting versions of the tale. Needless to say, I have done some research on the matter and will be happy to comment, if anyone has any questions.