SKY NEWS PRESENTER Adam Boulton has defended his comments that some Irish people need to “get over themselves”, noting that he said “some of you Irish”.
On Saturday, Boulton had tweeted that “some of you Irish need to get over yourselves” and that “interviewing is about challenging the interviewee not respecting”, after criticism of an interview he carried out with Tánaiste and Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney.
On Friday, Boulton asked Coveney if he felt guilty over Ireland’s approach to Brexit negotiations.
Boulton was hit with a backlash of critical comments following his interview with Coveney, which sparked him to tweet his comment about Irish people.
Speaking on RTÉ’s Today with Seán O’Rourke this morning, Boulton said that has had “absolutely no complaints at all” from Coveney or the Irish government over his comments.
When asked by O’Rourke if he had any regrets about sending the tweet, Boulton said:
No, because I was saying some of you Irish and I was replying to a series of abusive tweets which you can look up online calling me the C-word and a Brit and out of touch.
“People appeared to feel justified simply because I had challenged an Irish minister in this context. I felt that what they were saying was tedious, which is why I said I was bored now.”
After a week of touch-and-go negotiations, a deal announced on Friday morning saw British Prime Minister Theresa May guarantee there would be no hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic after the UK leaves the EU.
In his interview with Coveney, Boulton asked: “Do you think that this week’s kerfuffle has been necessary? Do you feel slightly guilty that perhaps the Irish government over-briefed what had been achieved as a victory over the British for the European Union?”
Coveney responded by saying: “We never looked for or claimed any victory over anybody.
“We have been saying for months now that we want to work with the British government to try to find a way forward that can reassure people in Ireland as well as the UK that we can manage Brexit and we can limit damage in the way that’s now in this agreement.”
Justifying his use of the word kerfuffle in his interview with O’Rourke this morning, Boulton said that “it was not in any way used to diminish the importance of the issues at stake”.
“[It was] simply to say that, frankly, we ended up on Friday where we had been on Monday. So you might think that it was in process terms, not in substance terms, all a bit of fuss about nothing.”
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