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The Irish Git (Telegram)

From liam Deegan on Facebook

ARTICLE RETRACTION, CLARIFICATION & APOLOGY

My earlier article on Leo Varadkar and his alleged use of the government jet has turned out to be completely incorrect and a grave error on my part for not checking the veracity of the allegation behind the story.

Sometimes journalists do get it wrong and like everyone else, we need to put our hands up and say we did. It is rare that I get these sorts of stories wrong, but I have to "man up" and admit that I got it very wrong in this case.

This is the correct and factual story...

I was originally informed by a source who understood that the government jet was travelling to London on Saturday 04 September 2021 as a positioning flight. The expectation was that it was going to be used to pick Leo Varadkar up and transport him back to Dublin after his attendance at a pop festival.

However, this evening I received a message from the family whose critically ill child was being flown to a London hospital for treatment that could not be offered here in this country.

The family member told me that the medical team, a family member and the aircrew stayed in the hospital overnight and departed today at 11:30 for Baldonnel with the patient on board as they had missed their outbound slot out of London, hence the overnight stay.

I unreservedly apologised to the family concerned and said that I would correct the story as part of the apology, which I am doing now. The family were the real story here, not Leo Varadkar.

I would also like to apologise to the medical team, the aircrew, the Department of Foreign Affairs and the HSE as they too were the real story in all of this, but they didn't and don't need the attention.

Using no excuses here... However, the speed at which the article was written perhaps bypassed the normal firewall that I use to stop the crap landing up on my desk and thus filtering out the rubbish claims that I see every day. That didn't happen today. I wrote before I fully checked out the story.

Strangely, I am also going to apologise to Leo Varadkar for the hate that he will have received over this unnecessary attention. In this particular case, he doesn't deserve the animosity. he might deserve contempt for everything else but not this.

I have no excuse for sloppy reporting on my part and therefore it is best that I leave Facebook to Facebook. My time has come to leave the reporting scene on here and leave it to others to take up the reins. Any future articles from me would likely be tainted or questioned as to whether they are true or not because of today's article. It's the worst thing that can happen to a journalist who is trusted by a lot of people.

I will leave this clarification up for the next few hours so that everyone can see how it can easily go wrong so quickly, and then I will delete Facebook from my life for good. Lesson learnt!

I want to thank all of the good and decent people who followed my journey on here for the last number of years. However, I hand the fight back to you now and I wish you all well on your own journey and fight, whatever that may be.

Liam

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