Welcome to the official website of Joe Jackson Journalist.

‘NO JOURNALIST IN IRELAND KNOWS MORE ABOUT DAVID NORRIS, I THINK, THAN JOE JACKSON” So said Damien Kieberd,who is the former editor of The Sunday Business Post, on Today FM on August 2nd 2011. My latest book David Norris: Trial By Media is now available in all bookstores in Ireland and signed copies, dedicated to the buyer, can be purchased, by clicking the ‘Shop’ link above. Thanks for checking me out. Still designing website, will add more in time.

Book blurb David Norris: Trial By Media.

David Norris was elected as in Irish Senator in 1987. In March 2011, he put himself forward as a nominee to become President of Ireland. Two months later, the Senator was mired in a controversy caused by the reappearance of two old interviews he had given and that threatened to derail his presidential campaign. “This is the cruellest thing that ever happened to me,” Norris told Irish journalist Joe Jackson at the time of the original publication of one those interviews in 2002. More recently, Norris has claimed that an interview Jackson himself did in 2002 was the “definitive rebuttal” of the allegations made against him nearly a decade ago and he says it “saved” his life. The senator made similar assertions in relation to an interview that was conducted by Jackson in 2011. This book contains the full transcripts of those characteristically probing interviews and presents a critical perspective on the way in which the Irish media dealt with the controversy. Trial By Media also is David Norris’s own, sometimes tearful, but more often joyful, and endlessly inspiring, life story told in his own words and in his own ebullient fashion.

Joe Jackson is an author, journalist, and broadcaster. His books include Troubadours and Troublemakers (Ireland Now: A Culture Reclaimed) Boyzone, Our Story, and Other Voices, Other Rooms, A Personal History of Folk Music, which he co-authored with singer Nanci Griffith. Jackson’s articles and interviews have been published globally in magazines such as Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Humo. He has interviewed roughly 1,000 musicians, artists, and politicians and worked for Ireland’s most prestigious media outlets, such as RTE Radio 1, The Irish Times, and the Sunday Independent. Jackson is currently compiling a collection of his most inspirational interviews, titled Walk On With Hope in Your Heart, and working on a play and a memoir based on his thirteen years as the last, official biographer, of Irish actor Richard Harris. The play and memoir are both called, Excuse med While I Disappear.

What follows is the prologue of the book. This is the copyright of Joe Jackson and can not be used, in part or whole, without permission in writing, from the author, myself. Any breach of copyright will be rigorously pursued.

Prologue.

It’s Bloomsday, June 16th 2011, and as I write these words, the political future of noted James Joyce devotee, Senator David Norris, hangs in the balance – like a sea green snot at the end of a sailor’s nose, as Joyce might say. Three months ago, almost to the day, the senator launched his campaign to become the next President of Ireland, and then, ten weeks later, listeners to one of the country’s most popular radio programmes voted him the person most likely to win the race. But that was before journalists Helen Lucy Burke and Jason O’Toole, dashed centre stage brandishing a brace of old Norris interviews, and accused him, in one case, of having the kind of “evil beliefs” that make him unfit to hold the highest office in the land. Now, according to one tabloid, ‘Norris has blown it’ by which I presume they do not mean his nose.
Then again, I can’t remember a time when David Norris was not being put on trial, in a sense, by the media. Or, at least, having his sexuality explored, sometimes to a pathetically prurient degree. In fact, my earliest experience of this particular, and maybe peculiarly Irish phenomenon occurred the first time we met. It was late one evening circa 1994, and Norris – someone I knew little about, apart from the fact that he was a senator, gay, loved James Joyce and had won a landmark case in the European Courts of Human Rights which led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Ireland – approached me in a Dublin restaurant that was run by Norman Hewson, the brother of Paul Hewson, aka Bono, who I’d recently interviewed. Incidentally, I was in that restaurant not to be fashionable but because that afternoon I’d met, in the offices of a nearby rock magazine, which sometimes published my work, an American U2 fan and now I was, let’s say, exploring all possibilities. As such, Norris’s contribution didn’t necessarily add to the mood of tentative romance.
Either way, as the senator approached I noted that he did so rather tentatively and that he looked somewhat perturbed. But the latter didn’t really surprise me. I’d noticed earlier that he was being interviewed over dinner by a journalist who, let’s say, had always struck me as far less interested in the art of interviewing than in the more basic, and, some would say, base, act of self-promotion, at the expense of interviewees. One of whom, Mary Black, an Irish singer, had told me she was “deeply upset” by “the sexist, condescending c**p” he had written about her.
“Good evening, my name is David Norris and I am extremely sorry for interrupting you while you are having dinner”.
“I know who you are David, and this is Alycia”.
“And, you, if I’m not mistaken, are Joe Jackson who does those weekly music interviews for The Irish Times and I hear on The Arts Show?”
“Guilty, on both counts, my Lord!”
“Then let me ask you something. And again, I’m sorry for interrupting you and, Alycia; forgive me for what I am about to repeat. But, Joe, this chap whose is interviewing me and who has just gone to the toilet –”
“I know who he is”.
“Well, he keeps asking me the most impertinent of questions, such as saying ‘When you were young, did you masturbate to pictures of Oscar Wilde?’ Is this the norm during interviews, over dinner? It’s certainly not, in my experience. What am I supposed to say in such circumstances?”
“Nothing. Don’t even say ‘no comment’ because even that quote gives him an excuse to print the question, which he probably will anyway. Just move the conversation ahead or stop it in his tracks by asking, ‘Why? Did you?’ That should do the trick”.
“Oh that is good! So, maybe this is all transference on his behalf!”
“Maybe! But David, go easy on the wine. I noticed he’s barely drinking while you are, let’s say, less immune to its charms! That’s another trick I hear he uses, getting people drunk while he remains sober”.
“That’s all called ‘yellow journalism’ where I come from,” said Alycia.
“I’m familiar with the term, and I guess that’s what this is, in a way,” Norris responded. “Ok, lovely to meet you both, albeit fleetingly, I better get back to my table before he returns. And thanks for the advice, Joe”.
“And I’ll send over a crate of mineral water! Good luck”.
With that, David Norris departed and we did not meet again until nearly a decade later, in 2002, when our paths crossed again largely as a result of journalism, yellow, or otherwise. By this stage, lured by the prospect of extending my journalistic palate beyond what Norris called, “those weekly music interviews” I had left The Irish Times, was doing broad-based interviews for the Sunday Independent and during that February, and found myself caught in the middle of an minor media tiff, which did, nonetheless, directly influence an interview I’d soon conduct with Norris.
Ronan Collins, a DJ on Ireland’s national radio station, RTÉ Radio 1, for which I myself also worked at this point, presenting a music series called, Under The Influence, had described the debut single by Irish pop group Six, There’s A Whole Lotta Loving Going On, as “absolutely awful” and “lacking in credibility, imagination and musicianship”. Their manager, Louis Walsh, responded by declaring that Collins was “a failed show band star” and then added, – referring to the latter’s charity work –that he should “go and save the children of the world”. So, in two interviews published on February 3rd, and February 10th, respectively, I gave Louis Walsh his say, and Ronan Collins, the right of reply.
What each actually said, as with much of the ephemera that defines the world of pop, is now largely irrelevant. However, I was more than happy to let each state his case in a national newspaper that had a potential reach of one million people, roughly a quarter of the Irish population, and leave it to our readers to decide who was right and who was wrong.
All of which brings us back to David Norris. The same Sunday my Ronan Collins interview was published, I saw, in another newspaper, Ireland On Sunday, the headline ‘Senator Backs Sex With Children’. Under that was the line, ‘Fury at gay’s “pedophilia is ok” message,’ beside which was a photograph of Norris. Shocked, as no doubt most readers of that newspaper would have been, by these claims, I read the article and discovered that the allegations were based on comments David had made during an interview he did with a restaurant critic, whose name I was encountering for the first time at this point, Helen Lucy Burke, for Magill magazine. I bought the magazine, read the article, and realised immediately that Norris’s comments clearly had been sensationalised and broadly misrepresented by Ireland On Sunday. Even so, the Magill article itself raised some troubling questions so I phoned Norris on February 11th, requesting an interview, which we did two days later in his office in Ireland’s government building, Leinster House. What follows, in the first section of this book is almost a word-for-word transcript of what was said, allowing for edits which, as with all exchanges I quote, and, indeed, all my interviews, are made purely as part of a tightening-up process.
Why am I returning to these tapes, after nearly a decade, and to my notes and diary from that period, plus all the related material surrounding my two most recent interviews with David Norris in 2011? Simply because there is the perception that he has “blown” his chance of becoming president and I happen to believe the man is too often being judged on headlines – a tendency of which Norris is aware – and on articles that continue to sensationalise and to misrepresent his beliefs and, for that matter, who he is.
Of course, I’m not deluded enough to claim that the three interviews we did, the articles that emanated from those interviews or this book, David Norris Trial By Media, capture what some might euphemistically call ‘The Truth About Senator David Norris’. Nevertheless, Norris himself does describe our 2002 interview as the “definitive rebuttal” of those accusations that were made against him by Ireland On Sunday, claims that our interview, in response, “saved” his life and makes similar assertions for our most recent interview. Though, in terms of the latter what David Norris – who tells me he does not like “sucking up to people” but who is, in my opinion, inclined towards hyperbole – said was that I had “saved” his presidential campaign. Although, realistically speaking, whether I did or not, to even the most infinitesimal degree, remains to be seen.
In the meantime, Senator David Norris definitely insists that he last interview we did, on June 9th 2011, includes what shall remain, presumably for the duration of the presidential campaign, his “final comments” on “quotes or controversies that have arisen from old interviews”. By which he means specifically, those he did with Helen Lucy Burke and with Jason O’ Toole. As such, now, a week later, on Bloomsday – the date I choose because Norris and I both adore the life -affirming aspects of Ulysses and I love even the similar resonances in even the word ‘Bloomsday’ – I have decided that everything we discussed, over nearly a decade, and as set against the backdrop of the frequently polar opposite positions that have been taken in the Irish media vis-à-vis Norris, should be a matter of public record. If only, again, in my own infinitesimal attempt to help my fellow Irish people to decide, in four months time, who they want to elect as our next President.
This really is my core reason for writing this book, although no doubt I will be accused of having other motives. It’s title, Trial By Media, incidentally, comes from a phrase that Senator David Norris himself used at one point, suitably enough, while being interrogated during a programme on Irish radio. So, let the trial begin. Or rather, let it continue.

Joe Jackson, Dublin, June 16th 2011.