SPIKED

As part of the settlement agreed today, a statement from Juliette Folens will be broadcast as part of the programme and a short segment will be edited out.

This is how RTÉ reported one element of the settlement arrived at after Albert Folens' widow took the network to court over their intention to broadcast a television programme accusing Albert of having been a brutal Nazi war criminal. Juliette was 83 at this stage. She had first met Albert when she was 19.

Juliette Folens was attempting to assert the right of reply which Albert had agreed with the Sunday Tribune and the journalist who interviewed him in 1985. This said that should any elements of the taped interview be used in public, Albert would have a right of reply. Albert had died four years earlier but now his widow was attempting to assert his right of reply on his behalf, nothing more, nothing less.

In the course of the negotiations, the family was shown a preview of the programme and were devastated when they realised it contained a reconstruction of a brutal Nazi interrogation in which Albert was portrayed as the interpreter. This fiction had never happened. Albert's job was purely as a translator. He had never been an interpreter. So an additional element of the settlement was the dropping of this "segment". This was highly significant as it underlined the extent to which the programme had set out to portray Albert in the worst light possible and this without a shred of evidence. That RTÉ could describe its dropping in the casual terms shown above is a betrayal of its role as the national broadcaster. Not only was the segment spiked, its significance was concealed as revealing its content would have undermined the whole basis of the programme.

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The programme used every journalistic device in attempting to attribute to Folens the worst possible role during the war. There was conflation, guilt by association, implication, and plain downright misstatement. The extract below from presenter Cathal O'Shannon will give you some idea of what was involved.

But Folens remained an elusive figure. However before his death he gave an interview in a Flemish publication in which he described himself as, and I quote, “a war criminal in an honourable cause”. In this article he made a reference to a controversial interview he had given Irish journalist Senan Molony in 1985 about his wartime activities. This interview has never been published or broadcast before, but it and other evidence raises serious questions about how active a Nazi Ireland's leading educational publisher really was.

The actual quote in the piece about Folens in the Flemish book was "oorlogsmisdadiger, honoris causa". The Flemish does indeed mean war criminal, but "honoris causa" does not mean "in a noble cause". It simply conveys that the title has been bestowed on the person without them having to fulfil the normal conditions required to earn it. The programme here has Folens appearing to endorse the Nazi cause, including its atrocities, actions which he actually abhorred.

The TV programme quote above goes on to suggest that God knows what he did. In the course of the programme it is stated that the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service) for which Folens worked was actually involved in rounding up Jews, with the implication that Folens himself could have been part of this. Folens worked as a translator of already published material and to suggest he was implicated in rounding up Jews was outrageous. During the war he had been involved in helping a Jewish colleague and a neighbouring Jewish family escape the Nazis.

The programme quote's reference to a war criminal and the 1985 interview is not only misleading, it completely avoids the context in which the remark was made. Folens is there referring to the honorary title of war criminal effectively bestowed on him in that 1985 interview by the journalist who is now involved in a programme which is attempting to use it to prove that Folens was actually a war criminal. This is weird, simply outrageous and gives you a good idea of the evidential standards applied in the compiling of this vile programme.

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So why call this post "SPIKED"?

SPIKE: (of a newspaper editor) reject (a story) by or as if by filing it on a spike: the editors deemed the article in bad taste and spiked it.

What the broadcaster chose to conceal here was the significance of the spiking of the brutal interrogation and the full context of its quote branding Folens a war criminal.

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And just to be clear, the outcome of the court case was a settlement and not a verdict. This was mainly because a devastated 83 year old widow was in no fit condition to pursue what could have been an interminable case. The terms of the settlement make it quite clear who the villain of this piece was.

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