Five years after he was arrested in Rio, plunging the Irish Olympic movement into its darkest moments, Pat Hickey was back in the media on Saturday in what appeared to be a rehabilitative two-page feature written by crime reporter Paul Williams.

The feature appears to have been sparked by a column in the Sunday Independent by former Sports Minister Shane Ross who had cast aspersions on Hickey’s dealing with out of favour leaders like Vladimir Putin and Alexander Lukashenko.

The piece starts with the line that “Former Olympic Council of Ireland president Pat Hickey has claimed he has been unfairly treated by people including ex-minister Shane Ross who want him “discredited” and “out of the way”.”

The sense of drama carries on with Hickey allowed a free run at protesting his own innocence and highlighting the fact that his exclusion from the International Olympic Committee was a self-imposed one and that he had left the Olympic Council of Ireland “in very good standing with a healthy bank balance.”

He refers to Ross as having “a reputation as a shameless political opportunist (who) should not be lecturing anyone,” and that the accusations against Hickey were “Scurrilous and outrageous.”

The writers’ lack of familiarity with the nuances of the Irish sporting landscape is evident in his referring to the Olympic Council of Ireland having been renamed as the Federation of Olympic Sports. A simple mistake, it is of course The Olympic Federation of Ireland, but one that indicates this was a piece driven less by hard investigative reporting and more on a basis of giving a right of reply to an individual.

Hickey speaks of “one of the “bizarre aspects” of the Brazilian (judicial) system (being) that prosecutors can use “unchallenged media reports” in court.

Perhaps there was a threat that last week’s column by Shane Ross could be used in such a manner and that the newspaper group should make amends in some way.

The piece goes on to stress that a number of charges have subsequently been dropped and that Hickey is confident his innocence will be vindicated.

This spat between two once-powerful men being played out in the pages of the weekend media seems very much out of tune and out of time with the glow from Kellie Harrington’s homecoming of less than two weeks ago and on the eve of the Paralympic Games.

 

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