IRELAND
The Irish Times

PATSY McGARRY, Religious Affairs Correspondent

Report is unequivocal in finding significant editorial and managerial lapses and oversights

IT IS clear, from the findings of an independent investigation into the Prime Time Investigates: Mission to Prey programme, where direct responsibility for that debacle lay. The fault was with management or, rather, the lack of it. The programme was allowed to freewheel to disaster with little or no management “interference”.

Former BBC Northern Ireland executive Anna Carragher investigated the programme for the Broadcast Authority of Ireland’s compliance committee. Her findings, as outlined in a briefing document presented to the BAI board, were unequivocal. “There was a significant failure of editorial and managerial controls within the organisation,” the document states, paraphrasing from Ms Carragher’s report.

Repeatedly, she makes comments along such lines as “concern was raised that the editor did not interrogate this more closely” or that neither…