Irish Examiner should hang its head in shame

national | health / disability issues | opinion/analysis Wednesday March 29, 2006 13:29 by Miriam Cotton

I don’t know the last time the Irish Examiner bothered to write about the subject of disability but it is a certainty that the issue is not a priority for the paper’s editors in the normal run of events and it has negligible coverage in its pages. For instance, if you compare its coverage of the subject of horseracing or business issues, disability trails well behind either despite its significance to huge numbers of people.

It seems, however, that the issue perks up considerably for the Examiner when it is associated with gunfire, criminal gangs and allegedly undeserved claims for disability allowance. Thus the headline blazing across the top of page 5 of today’s paper (29th March) over a story by Mr Jimmy Woulfe, the paper’s Mid West Correspondent, who must be proud to see the prominence given to his fearless reporting about Mr Anthony Kelly - 'a convicted Limerick criminal seeking a State disability allowance':

‘Anthony Kelly claimed E165-a-week disability allowance after being shot in a family feud. Yet in two years he spent E35,000 on five foreign holidays’

Make no mistake about what is intended by this headline: we are to infer that Kelly was in receipt of tax payer-funded disability allowance while lavishing expensive holdiays on himself and his family. But Anthony Kelly was never awarded the allowance - a fact that somewhat reluctantly and hazily emerges about two thirds of the way into the report, for those who trouble to read that far.

Is this an attempt to create hostility towards the issue of disability? Is it not the true motive of the piece to make us wonder how many Anthony Kellys are out there doing the same thing – to create suspicion about the number of disability allowance claimants?

Another inconvenient fact for Mr Woulfe is that Kelly has indeed been disabled by the wounds he sustained. And what is left unclear is whether the spending sprees that are referred to in the article took place before or since he became disabled.

Either way, the Irish Examiner now owes it to the substantial number of its readers who apply for disability allowance in difficult and deserving circumstances, to redress the disgraceful and insulting emphasis in their coverage of this issue. Whatever the truth of Anthony Kelly’s conduct, this sordid and insignificant story does not deserve the prominence it was given. For shame.