Rewriting history: The Sunday Independent attempts to memory hole two cringe TV interviews with broadcaster Mairéad Ronan

I tell her that in my research for this interview, I found it hard to find any major interviews after 2019.Sunday Independent journalist Liadán Hynes on Mairéad RonanWhy would Sunday Independent journalist Liadán Hynes write such a thing? A quick Google search delivers an array of media interactions with Mairéad Ronan, best known for her role on Ray D’Arcy’s radio show on Today FM (2000-2014). Most prominent among those media appearances, two studio interviews on Virgin Media’s The Six O’Clock Show which went out to a national audience, the first on March 9, 2021, the second on March 15, 2022. It’s nearly like Liadán Hynes is purposefully ignoring these television interviews in an attempt to tidy up the past. Like in George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the memory hole refers to a small chute connected to an incinerator where the ruling party systematically destroys inconvenient or contradictory documents. The cover story from Life magazine which comes with The Sunday Independent newspaper, offers us Mairéad Ronan anew. We’re supposed to believe she opted out of the spotlight because she wanted to spend time with the children, rather than spend some of that newly acquired dosh from the Covid testing enterprise her husband ran with his father in Co. Kildare. There’s no mention of the holiday home revamp in Co Waterford that got the go ahead despite local opposition. It doesn’t fit with the sob sorry narrative. It’s too hard to pull at heart strings when there’s a big budget construction in the way.The Life magazine puff piece doesn’t mention Enfer or how former Chief Medical Officer Dr Tony Holohan ended up as the chair of the medical advisory board for the company. Too many conflicts of interest to ignore. Even the Irish Medical Times picked up on the stench of ‘jobs for the boys’. There’s no talk of numbers in the Life article, just fawning complicity. We don’t know the exact amount Enfer made from processing Covid tests but we can deduce from Internet scrapings:The Health Service Executive (HSE) paid the Tipperary-based company Enfer Medical €122.4 million to process Covid-19 tests in 2020, with total state contracts for their services ultimately heading toward €200 million. The exact profit Enfer generated from these payments is not publicly disclosed because it re-registered as an unlimited company over a decade ago. However, the scope of their testing yielded notable payouts for individuals, including an €800,000 dividend paid to a former state scientist who joined the company. Operating on a 24/7 basis, Enfer Medical became the largest COVID-19 testing laboratory in Ireland. Throughout the pandemic, the facility processed over 5 million patient samples for the HSE.Instead of playing a tiny violin for Mairead Ronan in an effort to elicit sympathy, Liadán Hynes should have asked her subject about the conflict of interest of appearing on national television claiming she and the whole family had ‘Covid’ along with the dog. How did they know they had the illness if symptoms weren’t necessary? Did her husband’s business process the tests? Which kits did they use to discover they were ill? The interviewer also needed to ask about her husband making so much money from testing for the mystery virus while his wife claimed to have the thing that had replaced the flu. Basic journalism. Elephant in the room stuff. Not hard. Instead we get this slop:“…with Louis I am sure, sure, sure. He is the thing I’m most sure of in my life, him and our relationship.”That’s nice but what about the conflicts of interest? Mairéad Ronan didn’t look ‘wrecked’ at all on The Six O’Clock Show after her ‘battle’ with Covid. In fact, she appeared positively giddy about the whole episode, like she’d won the lottery. The Life magazine advertorial informs us she’s back with Ray D’Arcy for a new podcast which can only survive if the audience continues to overlook these awkward bits and agrees to the memory holing process. They’ll have to acquiesce to George Orwell’s doublethink concept from Nineteen Eighty-Four, the ability to simultaneously hold two contradictory beliefs in one's mind and accept both of them as true. It involves the act of deliberately forgetting any fact that becomes inconvenient, and then knowing it again when it is needed. We’re here. It’s happening. Barely anyone notices the contradictions or if they do, they don’t say them aloud. The majority get cross with you for noticing. They want to play along with the charade. The truth is too inconvenient. "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."Another George Orwell nugget to chew on. We have an opportunity to seize the narrative and to reject these totalitarian advances dressed up as friendly interplays. Who is in control of the past? Who is in control of the present? The mainstream media? Or those of us who demand better standards in public life and who are willing to stand in the way of the machine?The longer we leave it, the harder it will be to disagree, as the protagonists in Nineteen Eight-Four discovered to their detriment. Related articles: CRINGE TV: Mairead Ronan - whose husband made millions from testing kits - giddily talks about her battle with ‘Covid’Mairead Ronan’s funny moneyRTÉ presenters including Ray D’Arcy listen to cancer stories while failing to ask obvious questions about the trial Covid-19 injections and their link to the disease... Get full access to Aisling O'Loughlin at aislingoloughlin.substack.com/subscribe