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During 23 years with the BBC, and 40 years in journalism (when he was trained to use simple language, avoiding jargon), our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry has always been aware of the key rule that a proper apology for a mistake is almost NEVER made, and more evidence today underlines this salient fact.
Sadly there is even more evidence today of a fundamental truth – that people caught out almost never say sorry properly.
They will always say: “We are truly sorry FOR ANY OFFENCE CAUSED”, or “We apologise if THIS HAS CAUSED DISTRESS”…
Comments like these are NOT the same as saying: “I’m sorry for what I’ve done!”.
Unfortunately this basic fact has been underlined for me by extraordinary events today – many of them historical.
For example, terrible episodes during The Troubles in Northern Ireland (NI) are still grinding their way through the courts, so apologies (although not real ones) have had to be issued by the UK Government.
One instance took place after the awful murder of 12 year old Majella O’Hare.
On August 14 1976, when she was on her way to church with a group of friends in the Armagh village of Whitecross, they walked past an army patrol and, about 30 yards beyond it, shots were fired from a general-purpose machine gun.
Three bullets were found on the ground – but two of them had hit Majella in the back. and she was confirmed dead on arrival in hospital.
Many years after this appalling incident (in a 2011 letter to her father), Liam Fox then the Secretary of State for Defence wrote: “i apologise for Majella’s death and offer you my heartfelt sympathy”.
“lines that sort of say: ‘We’re sorry but we’re not'”.
This is not quite the same thing as a proper apology, I would suggest, and her brother Michael appears to agree, declaring that there were “lines that sort of say: ‘We’re sorry but we’re not'”.
Then there’s the one proclaiming ‘sorry, we’ve run out of money, so we have had to suspend temporarily the scheme’.
The UK Government used this line last month when trying to explain away problems with the Youth Parliament which caused huge anger.
The minister who oversaw the scheme, Stuart Andrew, said: “We had to have (a) slight pause – which was really distressing, we were sorry to see what happened”.
We have seen this phenomenon closer to home too, with the extraordinary controversy which has engulfed the Welsh language channel S4C.
During it another tactic was used – saying a sacking was unconstitutional/illegal, and that others were to blame.
Siân Doyle was Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the channel, but when she was off on ‘sick leave’ she was sacked and she has stated that she had been “dismissed by the Chairman of S4C, Rhodri Williams, in what I believe is an unprecedented lack of governance for a public body”.
She has added: “I was dismissed by letter, without notice, without a meeting, without seeing a copy of the Capital Law report (on bullying in her former organisation) or any evidence, without a right of appeal, and without proper grounds”.
Ms Doyle has declared that details of her predicament were leaked to the media beforehand, saying: “When my letter arrived to dismiss me on a Friday afternoon, I didn’t know that it was coming but the BBC knew and were planning the story before the email landed. If I had been driving I could have heard about my dismissal on the radio.
“The contents of my sick note from my doctor was only known by three people. But it was quoted directly by Martin Shipton in Nation Cymru (a nationalist website which is supported by the taxpayer).”
Then there is the unbelievable case of her appointee, Llinos Griffin-Williams.
She was also dismissed from S4C (as ‘Chief Content Officer’), after just over a year and a half in the job following allegations of gross misconduct, but in a letter sent by her lawyers she said that she was left “utterly devastated” by her “unfair dismissal”.
Ms Griffin-Williams claims she was dismissed by Mr Williams, but that he had “acted unilaterally without the knowledge of the senior management team…and the S4C board”.
She has proclaimed that she was “denied an opportunity to present evidence from the witnesses who were present (during the incident at the centre of it all) who refute the allegations made against me”, and a statement she has issued ends with the controversial claim that “two women in senior management roles at S4C” have made grievance complaints against Mr Williams.
Yet this action, like the one where they got rid of Ms Doyle, only took place after a thorough inquiry into the facts of what happened.
So there are, actually, lots of ways of apologising, but not really admitting you’re at fault, or as Mr O’Hare has put it, saying: ‘We’re sorry but we’re not’…
Details of Phil’s astonishing decades-long journalistic career (including his years in broadcasting, although NOT in S4C), as he was gripped by the rare and incurable neurological condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in an important book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now.
Regrettably publication of another book, however, was refused, because it was to have included names.
Tomorrow – during his career Phil has covered innumerable elections (indeed his first television interview was with a Welsh MP during the 1987 campaign), so information from surveys was always crucial, but now comes major questions about the effectiveness of polling companies after they over-estimated Labour’s success in the General Election (GE) massively and failed to predict Plaid Cymru’s (Plaid’s) victory in Caerfyddin.
