In a piece about my “setting the record straight” on ‘Father Ted’, Ireland’s fourth-best paper The Herald manages to confuse the issue further by not mentioning the co-writer of ‘Father Ted’, Arthur Mathews, AT ALL. So any Herald reader who was labouring under any misapprehension as to the authorship of the show, now thinks I wrote it on my own.

Fine, no-one ever read the Herald to get a story straight. But instead of admitting they cocked up a very simple job, they’ve gone on the offensive with this, and got it wrong again. I’m not talking about the attempt to make Arthur’s comments on The Rose of Tralee fit Michael O’ Doherty’s narrative, desperate and pathetic though the attempt is. No, it’s this bit…

But when this conversation was recorded in the Herald this week, Linehan became peeved that the photo used was cropped so as to exclude his co-writer Mathews. Perhaps feeling that this is part of a conspiracy to deny the couple recognition, Linehan launched into a Twitter rant…

Whoah, hold it right there, Professor. He wasn’t cropped out of the picture. He wasn’t in the picture. That picture is from the night I won an Emmy for ‘The IT Crowd’. He was cropped out of the story. The tiniest bit of research would have told you that picture was taken in 2008, long after my collaboration with Artie ended. Can’t you guys get anything right? How do you all manage to find the office every day?

The original story is quite something, Michael, read it again. In a piece about “setting the record straight”, the Woodward to your Bernstein (famous journalists) managed to further confuse the issue without ever having to go over the Herald’s four-syllable limit. I do admit, that takes a special kind of skill–the kind of skill that Herald writers, and only Herald writers, possess.

But at least in this latest piece, you do mention him, so you’ve sort of accidentally set the record straight. Well done! You’ve actually done your job as a journalist! I bet you weren’t expecting that when you woke up this morning!