Self-Googling should come with a government health warning.
For various reasons, mainly to do with updating my CV and collecting potential reviews and recommendations (okay, vanity too) I do it now and then, just to see if I missed anything.
Mostly, it involves zipping quickly past half a dozen pages of old news reports with my online byline, then repeating a few more times with alternate spellings (Gerard / Gerry / Jerry / Ger) and ignoring the false positives for a former Cork goalkeeper and assorted others.
This evening was different. My name showed up in 2006 annual report from the Broadcasting Complaints Commission.
Cue near heart attack as I downloaded the report.
On 12 October 2006, I appeared as a contributor on RTÉ’s Tonight with Vincent Browne, discussing a report from the Morris tribunal.
Afterwards, a complaint was lodged by a Martin Crotty, who believed that the programme was editorially biased.
Happily, the BCC found that the programme ‘dealt with the issue in an informative, fair and factual manner’.
So here I am, two tears later in December 2008, learning about this complaint. It’s an odd feeling, knowing I was ‘in the dock’ and wasn’t even aware of it.
