The normally impeccable reporting of the Financial Times's Irish correspondent John Murray Brown has received a broadside from Belfast Media Group chief Máirtín Ó Muilleoir.
Brown's report about the dispute threatening the collapse of the Northern Ireland power-sharing administration, contained the paragraph...
"At the same time, intelligence sources suggest a number of Catholic armed groups are opposed to devolved policing and the IRA is determined to murder a police officer – in the hope this may elicit a heavy handed security response and embarrass Sinn Féin."
Ó Muilleoir comments:
"Either it's a world exclusive and the IRA, contrary to all reports by from friend and foe alike, hasn't gone away or its piss poor reporting. There is a third option, of course, the poor old subbies have made a horlicks of John Murray Brown's copy. I'm going with the benefit of the doubt option, number three, until told otherwise."
I'd like to think Ó Muilleoir is right, but somehow I doubt that FT subs would do any such thing to Brown's copy. It looks to me as if the reporter should be the one with the red face.
For the record, Brown's September 4 story about the Independent Monitoring Commission's report said that the IRA was "no longer operational or functional" and it was headlined "IRA no longer seen as a threat." So which intelligence service was Brown referring to in his latest report saying the opposite?
