It wasn’t just the ungraciousness of Clare Daly’s departure from the election count centre after losing her European Parliament seat that left the air disturbed in her wake. It wasn’t even the falsehood in her valediction as she flounced out of the RDS, telling an RTÉ reporter who had requested a comment from her: “Ye’d no interest in talking to me for five years, so I’ve no interest in talking to ye.” What shattered the air was her dog whistle to haters of the so-called “mainstream media”. The salivating in the trenches of the dark web was almost audible.

First, the truth – Daly and her Independents 4 Change colleague Mick Wallace have a usual practise of not responding to attempts by professional journalists to contact them. They prefer to appear live on air where their words cannot be edited. I know this because they told me so when they were both still TDs. Their confession tumbled out when, innocently, I had asked if I could check their contact details as I had repeatedly failed to get any response from either of them. Since that day, I have tried in vain to contact Daly and Wallace numerous times in attempts to obtain comments for news stories, as required by professional ethics and by the Press Council’s code of conduct. Many other journalists have had the same experience.

When Wallace lost his European seat too, he promptly blamed the media. Having first emerged onto the national stage as quite the media darling, the parallels between him and Donald Trump go further than the bare facts that both men are property developers-turned-politicians with some ignominious financial histories. Something else they have in common is........

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