Sloppy, opaque journalism

It seems that Mark Hennessy, a senior political correspondent for the Irish Times, is a bit caught up by the excitement of talking to a "senior Irish political source" and forgot to do his homework. "The IRA is using untraceable money stolen from the Northern Bank robbery
last December to buy properties for cash in the United Kingdom, the Government believes, " he writes, and then seems to believe that we should all believe as well.

Mark Hennessy believes it himself, as he said on RTE Radio 1 after others began questioning his sources and methods. But why should we believe Mark? It's reasonalbe speculation. Surely, somebody does have about £26m in Northern Bank notes that they'd like to get off their hands. Surely, putting some of that into property seems reasonable. But I for one would like a bit of evidence that 1) it's the IRA, and 2) it's going into property. I could have written the same article myself without a shred of evidence.

The IRA are no doubt a prime suspect in the robbery, but as we all learned from the recent Iraq war, government beliefs are not always correct. We've had assertions of guilt from the chief of the PSNI, from the Irish government, from semi-state monitoring committees... but not from a court of law. We had assertions up and down the US and UK governments (and a few others as well) about weapons in Iraq, but evidence was unfortunately a bit harder to come by, as the NY Times proclaims in it's headline today. The politicians, it says, were "dead wrong".

But back to Ireland. The 'evidence' we have instead is the word of an anonymous "political" source, and some dodgy statistics. More on these numbers, but first, the source: why should he or she remain anonymous? Pressed by the radio panel, Hennessy refused to identify the source without explanation, silently invoking that highest of journalist principles of protecting your source to the bitter end. But what if your source deserves no cover? Would the source lose his or her job if he correctly stated that the government believes the IRA is buying property? Would that source's life come under danger if his or her identity were revealed? I think not. What if, in fact, this source is just leading you on to print what the government wants printed. That other of highest of journalistic principles is supposed to be delivering the truth to your readers. Here the truth is quite obscured.

But the most inane part of the article comes from those statistics.

The laundering legislation requires estate agents and others to declare all transactions over £10,000 to the Financial Intelligence Division of the National Criminal Intelligence Service. The NCIS in 2003 was told of 100,000 such transactions and this number is understood to have increased rapidly since, particularly after the laundering legislation was further tightened in March 2004.

Were these cash transactions? That would make it a bit more remarkable, and I would expect the paper of record to make that distinction clear. But 100,000... that seems like an awful lot of fraudulent transactions. Surely, the bulk of these were explainable and legal, but still reported. And if the legislation were tightened (tightened how? Lower threshold? Non-cash transactions included as well?), one would expect that the number of transactions reported would rise even in the absense of increased fraud.

But who would check on that?