Mr. Ivan Yates:

I have a real regret for Eimear Bradley and her team on "The Pat Kenny Show" and the situation they were put in. I have some regrets in relation to the "smear the bejaysus" comments and the way they were used by the Connolly campaign and the impact they had on Heather Humphreys. The context of that was, on 8 October, after Jim Gavin, I was discussing it on a "Calling It" podcast and I said that it was game over, Catherine Connolly was going to win and one of the options was to go negative, and I used a colourful phrase about that. The lie had gone the whole way around Ireland that I was actually involved in the Heather Humphreys campaign and then later Fine Gael accused me of being part of the Fianna Fáil campaign in saying that. I just made the comments in a punditry way of one of the options when you are losing. It is a Trumpian option. In 2016, I was in America for 16 weeks. You know, "Lock [Hillary] up." To go negative is always an option in a campaign. That was the context. It was nothing to do with anything else. I was never involved in the Fine Gael campaign. They actually dubbed a video and a tape of me giving a message to Fine Gael headquarters. It was all untrue.