Subscribe
The Irish media landscape remains one of the most politically subservient to its government in all of Europe. With a legacy of holding the strictest defamation laws in Europe curtailing the publication remit of Irish press, to the granting of government subsidies keeping unprofitable news outlets afloat, the Irish media are consequently uncritical and paid off. A number of other factors, such as state funding of the press, left-wing institutional biases within the field, and of course the revolving door between government and media, also put the credibility of Irish newspapers under serious scrutiny.
State funded papers will criticise the state on policies which are permissible, on grounds which their mandarin reporters have decided non-confrontational and thus unlikely to put their governmental grants in jeopardy. However many papers systematically avoid the tangible and deeply unpopular crises the country faces, whether that is migration or housing, or the nation’s unsustainable foreign direct investment economic policy.
Not only is there an issue with state subsidies, but also a strong left-wing bias, the public service broadcaster, RTE, reported in 2023 that a majority of Irish journalists surveyed by Dublin City University identified themselves as left-leaning. Those numbers are 61.5 percent identifying as left-leaning compared to only 8.5 percent right-leaning journalists. As such there is a built-in imbalance in the political angles of many Irish media outlets, one which disadvantages conservative political views and in certain cases is outright hostile to them.
The revolving door between government agencies and private business is a well known and discussed phenomenon. However, less noticed is the prolific motion of journalists towards governmental positions. For example, last year Gript Media reported that journalist Hugh O’Connell had been appointed Deputy Government Press Secretary and was alleged by critics to be biased towards Fine Gael. Yet that was not all there was to this story, the very person who he replaced in that position was Newstalk radio host Chris O’Donohoe. Now it is unsurprising that a press secretary may be a former journalist, the career roles are functionally related of course. But when one looks at this phenomenon more broadly, the pattern becomes apparent. Helen McEntee previously hired Irish Times reporter Fiach Kelly, while Simon Harris has employed reporters from the Irish Times and the Irish Examiner
The government is funding and creating spin doctors in the public media sector, then employing them internally as their advisors once their political value has ripened. Consider for instance the additional fact that Minister Patrick O’Donovan threw a temper tantrum after being concerned that the fuel protests in April this year were reported on by the media in a manner that was biased against the government.
There is an embarrassing contradiction here that the Irish political class will never admit. They will praise the importance of a free press, and the values of freedom of speech in one breath, then subsequently lambast any and all press outlets which dares to publicly criticise them. Not to mention the fact that with expanded government financial spending on news media, an increasingly unprofitable business model, papers have become in some cases completely subservient to government grants.
In fact, Minister O’Donovan was alleged to have had a secret phone call with the media censorship arm of the Irish government, Coimisiun na Mean off the back of RTE fuel protests coverage which he was unhappy with. It is also alleged that he asked one official within Coimisiun na Mean to investigate “whether there was a mechanism in the legislation that allowed the minister to seek an examination about the broadcasts” relating to these events.
That kind of conduct should be bizarre for a Western democracy like Ireland, and the Minister was rightfully criticised for this conduct. But again, this criticism was levied in such a manner that it did not rock the boat of government funding. Reporting covered the subject matter, but it did not venture to draw the natural conclusion that the Minister and his colleagues were infringing upon basic conventions of democratic and open government. These conclusions were never drawn for the precise reason that doing so would put government funding at risk for the papers, and could perhaps damage the future career ambitions of Irish journalists in the machinery of the state.
This issue is so widely known that one representative of a struggling radio outlet in Ireland claimed that local media broadcasters were engaged in self-censorship in order to prevent any loss of state funds required to keep the station afloat.
With the media commissioners offering sums in the millions each year on an increasingly frequent basis, the dependency of public media on the state has only deepened, this time with an emphasis on countering disinformation.
It was revealed that in 2025 the Irish Independent received around 330,000 euros from Coimisiun na Mean, alongside the Journal and the Irish Examiner receiving approximately 130,000 euros each. These funding schemes applied not just to papers with national readership, but also to smaller local outlets like the Connacht Tribune, Mayo News, the Kerryman, and the Westmeath Examiner alongside a host of other regional outlets of political importance. These outlets must be noted as significant for their local media coverage in Ireland’s intensely localistic electoral environment, where consistent appearance in such papers is arguably more visible to voters than national news. This in effect functions as a kind of influence purchase made by not just the Irish government but also a certain kind of left-wing political regime masking itself as centrist and the voice of reason despite escalating public contempt for government parties and the political left.
Most egregiously is the fact that the media regulator and the government which created it have not even attempted to hide their tracks. Coimisuin na Mean announced this year that it would be calling for submissions to fund which promoted media literacy to fight disinformation online. Again the disgraceful ideological bent of the Irish political system is on display, where unflattering press, or reporting against government interests becomes labelled as disinformation. To address the growing prominence of public consumption of such reporting or media content, they openly float calls to submit plans to re-educate the public that the government knows better than they do.
It is for these reasons that Ireland’s media landscape is structurally flawed. With one hand the government grants funds, and with the other it censors a press media who has become fiscally dependent or ideological onboarded. The sense of arrogant self-importance to such initiatives knows no bounds, with the debate around censorship in Ireland instead framed upon the very altar of democracy itself. The hypocrisy of such manouevers is lost on the Irish political class, as they have routinely undermined the authority of our state institutions and allowed them to fall under the influence of ideological and social cartels.
Any attempts to fix the Irish administration will require a total recalibration of the state’s relationship with the media. All government funding for news outlets must be halted immediately. Independent news sources should be rewarded by their economic viability as a product or service which the public is actually interested in supporting. In a digital age where social media offers this information for free on immediate demand with oftentimes more incisive commentary than even national papers of discord like the Irish Times.