Volunteers thrown under the bus, Bacik running from questions, Trumpian attacks on the Press. The summer recess might quell the Ogbu saga but it will haunt Labour

Published: 22:29, 16 July 2026 | Updated: 22:29, 16 July 2026 ALL controversies have a natural shelf life. So it has proven in the curious tale of Galway Mayor Helen Ogbu, whose erroneous tale of her arrival in Ireland – which Labour will have you believe resulted from a ‘typo’ on her website – came to be repeated on her YouTube channel, in the Labour party newsletter, multiple local media reports, a Labour TD and even party leader Ivana Bacik. On the webpage, Ms Ogbu stated that she had arrived in Ireland in 2006 following the assassination of her husband. But Sunny Orji-Ogbu was murdered in Nigeria in 2010, four years after the date stated online. After persistent reporting by the Irish Daily Mail, Labour and Ms Ogbu apologised for the error. We are now left to sift through the embers and figure out what we have learned from it. And it doesn’t make for pretty reading for the Labour Party. I didn’t think for a moment the story would give me enough copy for two weeks when I first spotted the inaccuracy. But the Labour Party’s amateur handling of this saga, which elevated it from a middle-of-the book story to the front page, has been illuminating. To recap: The Mail contacted Ms Ogbu and the Labour Party over 20 times on the day work on the story began, a Friday, but received no response at all. Not an acknowledgement, nothing. A separate press release on a different issue was sent out on Friday afternoon, at which point another email was sent, noting that the press office was clearly on duty. Still there was no response. Then the website was taken down the next day on Saturday, but still there was no response to our queries. Another press release went out on Sunday about an unrelated matter. Still no contact. Monday morning, still no contact. And so this newspaper went to Galway to establish the facts ourselves. It was only at 4.20pm that day we received a response, but one which failed to address our queries and raised a number of other queries. We decided, given the gravity of the problem in the timeline presented by Ms Ogbu, to proceed with the ‘doorstep’ – a well-established journalistic practice of knocking on a person’s door to seek an impromptu interview. Indeed, it was incumbent on us to give Ms Ogbu the opportunity to tell her side of the story before publication. This is when the party apparatchiks clearly hit the roof. A statement was issued attacking this writer and this paper for performing very basic acts associated with journalism. It blatantly linked this writer and the Mail with the ‘Far right’ and racist abuse suffered by Ms Ogbu, calling the approach ‘intimidatory and unacceptable’ – while downplaying the serious error as a ‘typo’. It said: ‘The Labour Party wishes to express our serious concern at the tactics used by a mainstream media outlet, particularly at a time when Far Right agitation is becoming increasingly evident across our communities.’ Labour TD George Lawlor said it wasn’t my ‘finest hour’ and alleged journalistic colleagues had been in touch to tell him that. Labour general secretary Billie Sparks claimed this newspaper has an ‘agenda’ in an email to a member of the public, and again linked us with the ‘far right’. She wrote: ‘As you may also know, far-right and anti-migrant activists are also seeking to attack and undermine Helen’s story.’ Every politician and political party has a duty to be truthful with the public. But the message from the Labour party is that it was racist of us to apply the same standards we would to any other politician to Ms Ogbu because of her ethnicity. And they walked right up to the line of defamation to make that point plain. This paper is no more responsible for the disgusting attacks on Ms Ogbu than the man on the moon. We condemn them completely and without reservation. But amid an army of racist trolls on social media, when presented with legitimate questions, Labour failed to see the wood from the trees. At best, it was intellectually lazy. At worst, it was a deliberate strategy designed to intimidate and smear, and in doing so, evade accountability. But enough about the Labour Party’s shameful attacks on the media. The party’s essential argument, that a glaring error was somehow repeated at the highest levels of the party, has been ‘we are incompetent, please leave us alone’. Only after asking three times and doorstepping Ms Bacik herself, did we get a plausible explanation for the fact that the same mistake appeared on Ms Ogbu’s YouTube channel at least a month before her website went live, when Labour insist the error on the website was the source of all the confusion. Who did they blame? A volunteer. And an ‘activist’ was responsible for the website. So much for the party of the workers. The Labour Party has been an irrelevancy for a decade now, wandering the wastelands of opposition and rarely climbing above about four per cent in the polls. Meanwhile, the Social Democrats eat into their soft-left base and Sinn Féin grow into a serious proposition to lead a left-wing government. No one has asked a hard question of them since they left office and a trail of broken promises behind them in 2016. Simple questions have gone unanswered until asked repeatedly. Phone calls to elected officials and press officers ring out. And how did Ms Bacik come to repeat the falsehood herself. It appeared in a letter to party members, endorsing Ms Ogbu for the Galway West by-election, and credited to Ms Bacik. It said: ‘Helen’s life story is extraordinary. Born and raised in Nigeria, she came to Ireland in 2006 and raised her own family here in the face of extreme challenges, following the assassination in Nigeria of her beloved husband, Sunny Orji-Ogbu.’ We are under no illusions that Ms Bacik actually penned the letter herself. But it is a stunning failure by her communications team to have the party leader compromised in this way for the want of basic fact-checking. Someone in the party put a false statement in Ms Bacik’s mouth. Someone then repeated the falsehood in a Labour party newsletter. Labour TD Ciaran Ahern repeated it on his Instagram account. Let me also remind you that the party didn’t tell us about these errors either. We had to go find them. It took us half a day. We are also to believe that Ms Ogbu herself is not responsible for what appears on her own website or YouTube channel. Both of the mistakes were made by an ‘activist’ and a ‘volunteer’. A woman who wants to be a legislator and a TD apparently does not review basic information about her own back story on her own accounts. It took two weeks for Ms Ogbu to personally apologise to her own colleagues about the error. That letter was not shared with this paper – it too had to be leaked to us. Political correspondents gather weekly to meet with Government press secretaries to discuss what was agreed at Cabinet. Every so often, we smell blood and the press secretaries get hauled over the coals. I only mention this, as I can hardly imagine anyone in the Labour Party handling that situation. ‘There’d be blood on the walls and you’d walk away laughing,’ one senior Government adviser told me when I put the proposition to them last week. This is to say nothing of the fact that the party leader Ivana Bacik twice declined to comment on the matter when we approached her in person over the last two weeks. Where is the courage? Where is the leadership? Why not rail against the press in her own name? No, she hid behind a press office that is filled with people younger and less experienced than she is. They are also unelected. Shown a couple of hard questions, what did Ms Bacik do? She allowed the party to attack the press, decline to comment and go to ground. Some leadership. It is no surprise that only first-time TDs have been trotted out in the media and at doorsteps to defend the party. Anyone with a bit of experience knew well enough to stay away from this debacle. This controversy may be about to burn out as the Dáil goes on summer recess. But the bitter taste it has left will not be forgotten. Volunteers in the worker’s party thrown under buses, a leader running from questions and Trumpian attacks on the Press from the left. But sure, the Labour Party are the good guys. Sorry we are not currently accepting comments on this article.