The Weekend On One With Brendan O'Connor

It will come back to haunt FG and Leo. I suppose they were short of time, but could have seized the nettle and used the changeover to put up Harris or Coveney as Taoiseach with a reasonable excuse of rotating. Unless it was specified that it had to be Leo in the original coalition agreement. Micheál Martin & FF have come well out of the arrangement so far overall.

Wrong again. I have evidence, but I'm not going to share it with you, because it is confidential.

Do you have evidence to support your claim about open relationships?

Do you have evidence to support your claim that 'it came up in many places' over the weekend? Did you mean in the media or not?

I avoided answering the question because 1) it assumed that I was some kind of loyal defender of Vradakar, and 2) it has no relevance to the discussion about privacy of the nightclub video.

Are you surprised that matters relating to removal of a video are confidential? I wouldn't have been looking to remove the video if there wasn't confidentiality issues. I have lots of evidence here, but I'm not going to share it wit you.

'Many an opinion piece'? Don't suppose you'd like to give any examples of these many opinion pieces where it came up? It's a bit strange that the only example you reference is the one that contradicts your position, given that Callan said;

Vradakar's double-standards and hypocrisy are entirely irrelevant. Privacy rights are not conditional on lack of hypocrisy. He's entitled to privacy of his private life, regardless of how he behaved in the past.

Did you miss the bit where I explicitly said “Privacy rights are not conditional on lack of hypocrisy.”?

I'll condemn Vradakar for lots of things, his poor leadership of the country (outside of the initial Covid phase, in fairness), his poor leadership in his various Departments, his poor leadership of his own party. I'm not too familiar with either of the incidents you mention, and I couldn't be arsed on reading up on them to allow myself to give a sensible opinion. So I'm not going to comment on those incidents.

As I previously explained, having looked at the emails, and the various responses (given that it took a fair bit of digging and pestering to get the matter resolved), the effort involved in redacting the personal information, which makes up most of those communications, would be too much. I don't give a toss whether you believe me. It is a sign of the weakness of your overall position that you repeatedly try to score points on an irrelevancy, while making unsubstantiated claims about non-personal matters (like the 'many opinion pieces' you mentioned) yourself.

The question of whether I personally got a video removed from social media is an irrelevancy. You know that SOME people get videos removed from social media. Whether I got one removed or not has zero impact on his privacy. But you’re choosing to make a big deal out of it to distract from the weakness of your position on his privacy.

Did you find any of those many opinion pieces that covered the issue over the weekend?

Fair point. I’ll leave Butters to have the last word. It seems like privacy, whether for Vradakar or me, is an alien concept for him.