Pavee Point More Concerned About Roma Leeches Than The Irish Traveller Community Whom They Are Supposed To Represent.

                           Roma Doing What They Do Best. TAKING What Doesn't Belong To Them.

Last night’s TV: Bogus Beggars

By Diarmuid Doyle

Tuesday August 16 2011

Ireland’s Bogus Beggars (TV3) is as bogus a title to a programme as Irish television has ever come up with. A months-long investigation into organised begging in Ireland, it focused on the Roma community, which it seemed determined to prove was at the centre of a massive scam involving international crime rings making a fortune off the back of innocent Irish do-gooders.
In the end, reporter Paul Connolly had to hold his hands up and agree that there was nothing there – no gang, no Mr Big at the head of it and no huge money to be made from begging in Ireland. Instead he found a world of “extreme poverty, desperation and a community struggling to survive”.
Sometimes, even when you’ve put months of work and no little resources into an investigation, there’s still no story. In those circumstances, you don’t do the story. But someone in TV3, much higher up than Paul Connolly, seems to have decided that one way or another they would get an hour of television from his work.
The result was an embarrassing shambles, which shames TV3. It promoted the programme on the basis that it was an expose of organised begging in Ireland even though it knew it wasn’t.
“TV3 Infiltrates The Sinister World Of Organised Begging in ‘Ireland’s Bogus Beggars,’” said a press release accompanying the preview dvd, a claim in direct contradiction of what the programme revealed and one which will surely lead to letters to the broadcasting complaints people.
Connolly did his best, but his original sources about gave him a bum steer. All he found was that some Roma do beg in an aggressive manner (which is against the law), but two minutes on O’Connell St would have shown that. Some Irish people beg in an aggressive manner, too. It’s hardly investigative journalism.
Where the programme really scraped the bottom of the barrel was in its interviews with members of hard-right, anti-immigrant groups – our equivalent of the British National Party - who described the Roma as “leeches” who had nothing to contribute to Irish society and who should be deported, every last one of them.
The initial editorial decision to involve these people in the documentary was bizarre, but to include what they had to say even after the investigation had established that there was no Roma crime ring, no organised begging and no huge profits being made by the beggars, was unforgiveable. To say the programme was disappointing would be an understatement. It was a disgrace. http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/tv-radio/last-nightrsquos-tv-bogus-beggars-2848964.html