Ms Geraldine Kennedy:

It would be very unusual for me to be contacted about an ad. However, within The Irish Times, if what might be deemed a distasteful or garish ad or something like that came up, the advertising manager or his deputy would come to me and point out that it was going in tomorrow and might ask whether that was okay. On some occasions I would say "No". The other thing they would be looking for is to shape ads. They might want the ad to be a given way so that the ad was the feature on the page and the editorial was simply dressing, whereas I would always insist that it should be the other way around, because it is a newspaper and the ads should go around the stories.

Anyway, I was contacted by Denis O'Brien because he had put in an ad which was pulled by me from the newspaper. He must have been told that the editor had pulled it. Then, the next time he wanted to put in an ad he wrote directly to me and put it to me that I would be making the decision anyway. That was the reason for that particular contact.