John Delaney at the FAI Thread - (Mod Notes in OP)

[Deleted User] wrote: »

It's interesting that the mods have allowed pretty much open season in this thread, and are overlooking posts containing abuse and trolling.

Anyone seen Dots. His splutterings about the reality of the context of the situational realities were the funniest efforts yet. Thread needs laughs.

Strawberry Milkshake wrote: »

I know there’s a few on thread spats going on between a few posters and I kinda skim over those posts.

Would you mind giving me your take on what’s going on presently, how things got to this stage and how relations can be fixed?

Please don’t take take as a loaded question. I’d genuinely like to know

Arghus wrote: »

That's all very well and we're all - well, I presume most of us - are in favour of a reasoned debate. But I think you are, at best, being very disengenous

I don't really have a problem with people arguing for the other side in this case. For instance I can understand the legal argument for Delaney staying largely silent yesterday. I don't agree with it and I think he should have spoken, but I do understand that he may have been advised not to. While I think his silence about many issues spoke volumes, that, in and of itself, isn't enough to hang him with. And there's no doubt good work being done by good people in the FAI. So I'm not just anti FAI or Delaney just for the sake of it.

But reading through the thread in the last while I really don't think you've lived up to your own supposed high standard. You've resolutely backed the FAI to the hilt, even in the face of mounting evidence that they have, at the very least, serious questions to answer about transparency, corporate governance, accounting practices, etc, etc. And it's not just the posters of Boards.ie that have questions at this stage, it's state bodies, the Oireachtas and all of the media organisations in the land.

But the more these questions mount, the more entrenched you seem in your willingness to bend over backwards to defend the conduct of the FAI. Yesterday was farcical, the FAI representatives were evasive under questioning, amazingly selectively aware or un-aware of pertinent matters, full of delaying tactics, unable to correctly answer basic questions about the organisation - the honoury treasurer who didn't have a clue how many bank accounts the FAI had!

The charitable interpretation of this would be that the FAI is a badly run organisation. The uncharitable interpretation would be to suggest that the FAI are hiding something and are putting all their efforts into damage limitation and ducking and dodging. If they've done nothing wrong why then are they trying so hard to look guilty?

And yet your main takeaway from yesterday was nothing to do with this but praise for MHR for "telling it like it is."
Honestly? How can I read that and presume that you speak in good faith? There was hours worth of talking points from yesterday and you selectively ignored them and cherry picked one tiny aspect of proceedings to talk about.

And that sums it up for me. You cherry pick facts to suit what you want to say and your responses and "arguments" have become more childish and divorced from reality as things have gone on. You say this is because you can't get the reasoned debate you actually want and so there's no alternative but just to not engage seriously with people here. In actual fact the truth is one of two things. You are either (a) too commited to your line of thinking in relation to the FAI that you can't allow yourself to question it, even in the face of increasing evidence to the contrary, so it's easier just not engage properly with the issues in anything but pithy responses. Or, (b) you're trollin' hard.