For more than a week now, journalists in RTÉ have been studiously ignoring a national political news story. A prominent Labour Party member, its candidate in the recent Galway West by-election who came third with almost 13,000 votes, and who is now the Mayor of Galway, has been challenged over misleading personal information on her own website.

An account of her tragic back story, which was also shared by party leader Ivana Bacik, and featured in Labour Party newsletters, turned out to be untrue. Conflicting and frankly

implausible excuses for the apparent misinformation/disinformation, which was blithely trotted out by Labour at every available opportunity, have been offered by the party and the member over the past week.

The story has been trending across social media all week, suggesting that the public are quite exercised by this issue, and it is clear there are still many unanswered questions around the entire saga. Just don’t expect them to be asked by RTÉ.

And yet the broadcaster’s director general Kevin Bakhurst still seems baffled by the fact that licence fee revenues continue to fall, three years on from the ‘payments’ scandal. Astonishingly, the public is not willing to pay for journalism which censors its output, which panders to certain political ideologies while traducing or silencing others, and which unilaterally decides what truths the great unwashed can handle.

Tens of thousands of previously compliant licence-fee payers are now withholding the levy, even at the risk of criminal prosecution. Three years on from all those promises to rebuild public trust, RTÉ’s response to an inconvenient story is to pretend it’s not happening and hope it goes away.

The Helen Ogbu saga, and the mysterious ‘typo’ on her website which went unchanged for over a year and wrongly claimed that her husband had been assassinated before she came to Ireland in 2006, when he was alive and well when she actually came here in 2005, is by no means the only major news item to have been ignored by the station’s intrepid newshounds.

Last year’s seismic UK Supreme Court decree that women are biological females, and not men in dresses, was also ignored by the station. When asked in an interview about such inexplicable omissions from the entire station’s news output, Bakhurst mused that they must have had more important matters to cover. Not a great deal of curiosity, there, from the man charged with restoring public trust in the national broadcaster by proving that it is fair, unbiased and even-handed. Let’s be honest, Kevin, if a story doesn’t fit with your journalists’ left-leaning, morally superior, luxury-belief, virtue-blasting agenda, it just doesn’t get covered. Did you know that Hamas brutally cracked down on a series of protests by

Palestinians in Gaza against the terror group’s murderous regime, on June 26 last, with ringleaders tortured and executed? Not if you were listening to RTÉ, you didn’t.

There have, of course, always been people who’ve baulked at paying the licence fee. But I’ve been astonished at how many friends and relatives, lifelong TV licence holders, who’ll now tell you that they’ve cancelled direct debits, ignored reminders and made a conscious decision to withhold the fee, in protest at the way the national broadcaster is run.

One friend sent me a screenshot of the Mail’s Ogbu coverage last week, saying: ‘I honestly believed I could always rely on RTÉ to tell me the truth.’

When is an increase not an increase? The DG has written to staff to ‘categorically refute the suggestion’ RTÉ is ‘looking for an increase in public funding’ this year. It just wants a €55million ‘top-up’ from the €725million bailout already pledged by the Government.

That’s almost one-third more than the €41.3million it got from your taxes last year, but it’s not an increase. Just a slightly bigger wedge of money already promised, with the ‘non-increase’ required because of the continued slide in licence fee revenue. Or, as Bakhurst put it, ‘the increase is already part of the phased commitment given by Government’. So definitely not an increase, then.

You don’t win public trust by treating the public like idiots. And when they choose not to support you through the licence fee, resorting to clawing your revenue out of their taxes, while continuing to compete with the commercial stations for advertising income, is not going to go down a storm either.

At the height of the recent row over Derek Mooney’s ‘reclassification’ as a producer, which omitted him from the top ten presenters’ pay list, Bakhurst complained that RTÉ was being roasted for its honesty.

It had ‘paid the price’ for coming clean about the arrangement, he said, and the subsequent criticism it shipped was ‘not an incentive to be more transparent’.

Since when does a publicly funded body need ‘incentives’ to be transparent about its use of public funds?

I still reckon that was one of the most jaw-dropping statements ever to come from the head of a major organisation, particularly one that’s going through taxpayers’ money like grain through a goose.