The Truth Drove Louise O'Keeffe, and the Truth Won

By Una Mullaly
Irish Times
February 3, 2014

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“Wronged as a child and challenged with lies, Louise O’Keeffe reached for the truth, a truth that could never escape her and emerge as something else. A truth that was brought to heel by the European Court of Human Rights.”

I was working late the other night, accompanied by a friend, waiting around to grab some quotes from people, when he asked, “do you ever just make things up?” No, I said, never. Making up what would seem like an unimportant anonymous quote would be the same as making up something a minister told you, which would be the same as giving a false opinion in a film review, or pretending you had a source for something when it was just rumour. It’s all the same. It’s the principle. You just don’t want to go there.
While we were talking about this, I recalled one of the first lecturers the journalist Eddie Holt gave my class in DCU. He was talking about truth. If you lie or are dishonest in journalism, he said, that lie or that remark that wasn’t fully right, or that opinion you feigned, will run away from you, it’ll take on a life of its own and go all sorts of places and possibly turn into something unrecognisable. Inevitably it will come back to bite you in the ass.
Decision time The truth, on the other hand, is steadfast. You can control it. When you put it out into the world, it comes to heel. Aged 18, and listening to Holt, it was decision time. Are you going to be the kind of journalist who is led by the truth, or the “kinda” truth? If you want to live with yourself, there’s no contest.

Every journalist knows the feeling of waking up in the middle of the night thinking, “I did get their name right, Didn’t I?” or “it was a hundred grand and not a million, wasn’t it?” You’re dealing with quotes and truths and figures and facts and feelings so much that getting everything right can create a low level of anxiety. Honest mistakes can happen, naturally, but it’s a whole different scenario if you’re purposefully misrepresenting something.
Of course, plenty of journalists don’t give a toss about these kinds of things. Reading reports from the phone-hacking trial in Britain and how some journalists engaged in such dishonesty brings any right-thinking person to despair because the truth was dispensed with so brutally.
You know the truth when you hear it. It rings in your ears. It’s why some speeches bring us to tears and others leave us cold. You know it when you see it, in the honesty of a particular painting, or the brutality of a particularly affecting photograph. Humans are so attuned to truth, that our minds fizz when we meet someone new and we subconsciously gather together all of their body language and quirks and intonations to create an instant judgment on their character.