Inky Inky Finger

[YouTube thanks to Damien Mulley]

I did a quick Twitter post last night when I noticed a story on RTÉ News online about two anonymous paintings of a naked Brian Cowen that had appeared in two Dublin galleries yesterday. Underneath a picture of one of the paintings a sub editor had made a pun about one of the paintings being “well hung”. I was surprised but pleased that RTÉ could make fun of the situation.

I was more than a little surprised tonight then to hear that RTÉ issued an apology to Cowen and his family over their reporting of the story. Watching the report above, I really don’t know why they would have had to do so. I know our libel laws are amazingly out of date, but surely they couldn’t cover anything said in the report? The story on RTÉ online has also since been edited and the pictures of the paintings have been removed.

I look forward to hearing more about it tomorrow anyway. In the meantime, you can read the latest reactions by searching for #picturegate on Twitter.

[Update 25/03/09] It gets worse! I just read the text of the apology on the Irish Times website:

“On last night’s programme we carried a report on the illicit hanging of caricatures of the Taoiseach in two Dublin galleries. RTÉ News would like to apologise for any personal offence caused to Mr Cowen or his family and for any disrespect shown to the office of the Taoiseach by our broadcast.”

To make matters worse, they’re also reporting that “Fianna Fáil TD Michael Kennedy last night called on RTÉ director general Cathal Goan to consider his position”. Seriously, I know things are bad right now, but Cowen and the FF party need to figure out when to laugh and roll with it. They’ve now achieved something I thought was impossible: to look even more pathetic than they already did.

[Update 25/03/09] Here’s the video of the apology.

It seems people are less perplexed about this than I am, but more angry. Damien Mulley, who posted the first video here, just wrote his own blog post about RTÉ’s apology, and other artists are now starting to publish more naked pictures of Cowen.

[Update 25/03/09] Nearly 24 hours have passed since I first posted here about what’s now just called Picturegate. It’s funny how fast things move sometimes. We now know that the artist in question is called Conor Casby. Apparently the pictures were hung in the galleries weeks ago, but it was RTÉ’s report two nights ago that made the shit hit the fan.

Today, Gardai visited Today FM trying to strongarm the contact details of Mr Casby out of them. He had been in touch with the Ray D’Arcy show for a couple of months. They didn’t give the Gardai his details, but, in a strange turn of events, Mr Casby contacted the Gardai himself and gave a voluntary statement. It just goes to show how out of hand the whole thing had gotten that there was talk of charging him with criminal damage for putting some glue on a wall and incitement to hatred (???).

The story has been all over the radio all day, and all over the world thanks to the BBC, The Times and the New York Times. I’m still pissed off that RTÉ were made to apologise, when no other media group in the world has even been asked to (to the best of my knowledge), and they’re all still publishing images of the paintings which caused such offence to the office of the Taoiseach.

I guess we can take some comfort in the fact that the creative types didn’t let us down. Check out some of their sterling photoshops of Brian Cowen over on the Creative Ireland website. This one is my favourite:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 1:48 am and is filed under opinion, politics, videos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.