A TWEET by a senior RTÉ journalist led to the DUP derailing Monday's potential border deal, the party's former Westminster chief of staff has claimed.
Christopher Montgomery, a Derry-born Conservative who worked for the DUP until earlier this year, said RTÉ Europe editor Tony Connelly's tweet developed into a news story which prompted Arlene Foster to step in.
BREAKING: UK will concede that there will be no "regulatory divergence" on the island of Ireland on the single market and customs union, acc to a draft text seen by @rtenews
— Tony Connelly (@tconnellyRTE) December 4, 2017
Mr Connelly, who was raised in Portstewart before moving to Derry, has been lauded for his coverage of Brexit and his recently-published book Brexit and Ireland – The Dangers, the Opportunities, and the Inside Story of the Irish Response has won acclaim on both sides of the border.
He was described by commentator Fionnuala O Connor in her Irish News column yesterday as the "experts' expert".
On Monday morning, hours before Theresa May's crunch meeting with Jean-Claude Juncker, Mr Connelly tweeted that the "UK will concede that there will be no 'regulatory divergence' on the island of Ireland on the single market and customs union" according to a draft text seen by RTÉ News.
However, the anticipated deal later failed to materialise following a phone call between Mrs May and Mrs Foster.
Speaking yesterday, Mr Montgomery said other media had picked up on the tweet and turned it into a story.
"The way this story got into the news was a Belgian MEP gave a read out of text which he was shown by the commission, this was then picked up by the Europe editor of RTE Tony Donnelly (sic), who then said there's going to be convergence rather than alignment," he told Radio 4's Today programme.
"This sounds like a theological point but it's a very, very important point – because the Europe editor of the RTE said this, you and your colleagues (the BBC and other journalists) treat it as a real news story – it wasn't a real news story."
Asked by presenter Nick Robinson if he was suggesting that there would have been a different outcome without the journalist's tweet and subsequent story, Mr Montgomery said: "I can't see why it wouldn't have been."
Speaking yesterday on RTÉ, Mr Connelly said the state broadcaster does not reveal its sources but the leaked text did not come from the Irish government but from "two other non-Irish sources".
He said RTÉ had reported it as the UK appearing to have "conceded the principle of no regulatory divergence" and that the broadcaster was able to quote a paragraph from the text "to the effect that there would be no regulatory divergence".
"Then we also reported that that text had been updated to say that the phrase 'continued regulatory alignment' had been put there in its place," he said.
The RTÉ Europe editor added that the report "couched" the text to highlight how it was in draft form.
