15 May 1997 Edition

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Row over Sunday Times article

By Brian Campbell

Bernadette McAliskey and Rogelio Alonso, a Belfast-based Spanish journalist, have jointly lodged a complaint against The Sunday Times for an article which McAliskey calls ``deliberately and vindictively misleading and mischievous''.

The article appeared on Sunday 11 May under the bylines Henry McDonald and Rogelio Alonso and was headlined ``McAliskey declares IRA war is over''. The impression was given that it was based on an interview given by McAliskey to the Sunday Times last week. ``Her intervention comes at a crucial time,'' the article says.

In fact the article was based on an interview given to Alonso at the beginning of April which was subsequently carried in the Spanish daily, El Mundo. Other quotes in the article date from 1995.

McAliskey accuses McDonald of having ``distorted and misconstrued [the original interview's] content and placed quotations from it in the separate context of his own interpretations to create an impression of a recent discussion with Mr McDonald and to attribute his sentiments to me.''

Alonso told An Phoblacht he was ``very annoyed'' at what happened. He said that despite repeated requests he was not shown the content of the article before it was published and that it was agreed that his name would not appear as a co-author of the article. He pointed out that his name was not on the article in the British edition of the Sunday Times. He said he was ``dismayed to find that most of the article did not derive from the interview itself. Rather, I feel that my interview transcript has been used by Mr McDonald and the Sunday Times as a platform for airing his own opinions''.

McAliskey echoed Alonso's annoyance. She said the distortions ``had no purpose beyond the furtherance of Mr McDonald's active anti-republicanism.''

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