Mr. Peter Feeney:

It is a fair question, and one I asked too when I got the job. When the Press Council of Ireland and the Office of the Press Ombudsman were being established in 2007, my understanding is that editors resisted putting complaints about front-page stories on the front page. The tabloids, in particular, felt that the whole of the front page would just be a decision of the Press Ombudsman and that would interfere with their sales. The agreement reached at that time was that the decisions on complaints would have to be published in the first four pages.

An additional problem I have, and I mentioned this already, is that it is far harder for a decision of the Press Ombudsman to have the same impact regarding an online article, as compared with print. As the Chair will be aware, online publication is much more fluid, it is far harder to find articles and they disappear very quickly. We have an ongoing issue with trying to establish a means whereby if our decision must be published online that it will have impact in the online edition of the publication. The argument for publication on the front page was lost in 2007 when the editors would not agree to it. That is the honest answer, as far as I know.