FORMER RTÉ PRESENTER Sean O’Rourke is to interview Taoiseach Micheál Martin today in O’Rourke’s highest-profile outing since the Golfgate controversy.

As part of this year’s MacGill Summer School event, a three-day event that hosts discussions on the economy, society and public policy, O’Rourke will interview the Taoiseach at 5.30pm today in an event headlined as ‘Meeting the Challenges Ahead and Overcoming Them’.

O’Rourke was one of the high-profile attendees at the Oireachtas Golf Society dinner held at a hotel in Clifden, Co Galway in August 2020 amid strict Covid-19 restrictions.

Then-Agriculture Minister Dara Calleary, then-EU Trade Commissioner Phil Hogan, and Supreme Court judge Séamus Woulfe, as well as a number of senators, also attended the dinner.

Calleary resigned immediately from his role, and Hogan resigned later following increasing scrutiny of his whereabouts and actions.

O’Rourke had retired from RTÉ at the time of the dinner, and subsequently apologised for attending the event.

“I should not have been at the dinner in Clifden on Wednesday. I don’t have a defence,” he said on Twitter later. 

The veteran journalist was in talks with RTÉ at the time to return to the station for a Saturday current affairs programme. In the wake of the controversy, those plans were cancelled.

A case against two prominent politicians and two hoteliers over their alleged role in organising a controversial golf dinner during Covid-19 restrictions last summer will be heard in early January, with the hearing expected to last five days as there are 51 prosecution witnesses.

Among the other guest speakers of the MacGill Summer School programme today, the last day of the event, are DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson and Ambassador of Ireland to the United Nations Geraldine Byrne Nason.

Speakers in the previous two days included Executive Director World Health Organisation Dr Mike Ryan, Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe, and Professor of Immunology Luke O’Neill.