Philip Boucher-Hayes

The food industry’s dismissal of the new code on advertising food to kids as based on “flawed science” got a lot of play during yesterday’s news cycle. Paul Kelly from Food and Drinks Industry Ireland (an arm of IBEC) said the nutrient profiling system that this country had adopted wholesale from the UK was ”out of date”.

Nutrient profile scoring. “Flawed Science” says the Irish Food Industry

One wonders do McDonalds and Pepsico who use the same system know that its out of date? On Drivetime we turned to food policy expert, Martin Carraher, from City University London to see if the nutrient profiling system we have borrowed has had a positive impact on childhood obesity over there. “Too soon to say” is the scrupulously honest answer, but there is no doubt in Martin’s mind that kids are buying less High Sugar / High Fat / High Salt junk food as a consequence.

Have a listen to Dr Carraher here or go the RTE Player where there’s still two days left to watch a documentary which exposes the clever little tricks the food industry plays to keep us guzzling the same foods subject to this advertising ban. I am of course talking about the excellent “What’s Ireland Eating” presented by the peerless … oh what’s his name … good looking bloke … slipped my memory, anyway watch here

It could be that “Harry” is the only factually accurate word in this headline.

Bank Holidays on a News Desk can be a lonely old station. You’ve got three and half news cycles stretching out in front of you and not so much as a fig leaf of real, new, as yet unreported news to cover your embarrassingly long list of re-heated items. Nobody of any consequence anywhere returns your calls from about 2pm on the Friday afternoon. The only thing in your inbox is the thoroughly predictable attention seeking of a few old dinosaurs who would struggle to be newsworthy even if they walked to the corner shop without clothes and their hair on fire.

So when a couple of Tabloids were alerted to proceedings the previous Saturday in Uxbridge magistrates court it must have been what an old editor of mine used to call “ferret down your pants time” ie look lively. A man called Ashraf Islam had pleaded guilty under section 16 of the offences against the person act to threatening to assassinate Prince Harry. There was added value to the story in that it came just 24 hours after the murder in Woolwich of Drummer Lee Rigby.

The Star was out in front straight away “Irish Jihadi Caged For Plot to Kill Harry” accompanied on the front page by a picture of a menacing looking shaven headed man with a Taliban regulation issue beard. The “Convert’s evil plan to murder prince” was detailed. And The Star editorialised on how all of this would be unknown had they not pressed the Crown Prosecution Service for details under the headline “Brits Deserve The Truth On Terror”.

The Sun Headline was a typically more terse “Brit Jihad Harry Kill Plot” over a copy of the same picture. They offered the additional nuggets of a glimpse of the accused’s internet search history which included google searches for kidnapping, guns and vans. The Telegraph reported the facts but added the fascinating nugget that Ashraf Islam had been “radicalised in prison, it was claimed last night”. Which prison and who was doing the claiming was not expanded upon in the piece.

By Tea time on Monday 72 news outlets around the globe had reported the sensational story of the Jihadi intent on abducting and assassinating Prince Harry. Fleshing out the scant details of what was known with breathless accounts from anonymous securocrat types about the probability that the Taliban had targeted the third in line to the British throne.

The actual known facts of the story were only this; Ashraf Islam had handed himself in at Hounslow police station the day after Lee Rigby was murdered and threatened to murder Prince Harry. He was charged under section 16 of the offences against the person act, namely that he had made a verbal threat. One assumes the threat was made to the police officer in Hounslow. He pleaded guilty to the offence in the Magistrates court and is being held on remand pending sentencing.

And that’s that, or it would be that if you were printing the story accompanied by this image of Ashraf Islam.

Clean cut, Mark Townley. Not much like a Jihadi.

On Saturday night I started to get missed calls on my phone and a lot of emails and tweets. The Mail wanted to get in touch with me. Then a producer of BBC Ten O’Clock News was looking for me, and then somebody else from another division in the BBC. They knew by this stage that The Sun, The Star and The Mirror had lifted a photo of Ashraf Islam from my Twitter timeline or from my blog. This photo lent the otherwise rather scant facts of Ashraf Islam’s arrest and remand an entirely new dimension. Gentlemen playing by the Marquess of Queensbury rules that they were they wanted my clearance before using the photograph.

As a rule I always cooperate with pressed colleagues working under the cosh of an impending deadline. It’s a karma thing. On this occasion I declined permission. To my almost certain knowledge Ashraf Islam is no more a convert to Islam than I am. In fact I’ll bet I probably know more about Islam than Ashraf and can make a pretty good stab at saying the call to prayer phonetically. I know this because I know what all the journalists lifting the picture from my twitter timeline should have seen straight away. Ashraf Islam is actually one of Ireland and Britain’s most prolific con artists.

He was born Mark Townley, but has at various points either changed his name by deed poll or re-fashioned himself as Antonio Mandez, or Marx or others that I don’t know about, and Ashraf Islam is merely the latest in a long line of aliases. I have been following his scrapes with the law and the complaints of his victims periodically since 2007. If you are interested in what he has got up to and what kind of a person he is you can listen to a detailed interview he gave me in November 2012 here. You can listen just like any visitor to my timeline can listen. You could listen and put those facts together with the rather underwhelming circumstances of Ashraf Islam’s arrest and arrive at the conclusion that this man is anything other than a Jihadi.

He is a sociopathic, egomaniacal monster who has left untold financial and emotional damage in his wake. He is a narcissistic rogue who is utterly convinced of his own brilliance and superiority to those around him. He is in short a nasty piece of work but he is no Jihadi. How could he be when he is utterly incapable of surrendering his life to anything other than the pursuit of his own comfort and happiness.

Even a quick scan of the internet for Mark Townley would confirm that Prince Harry is at far greater risk from contracting Avian Flu walking around West End nightclubs than he is from Mark Townley AKA Antonio Mandez AKA Marx AKA Ashraf Islam. Put his name into google images and one of the first returned results is from his foray into the porn industry with an offensive skin flick called “Jesus Christ – Porn Star”.

Ashraf Islam. Clearly not a Jihadi

Two minutes of research should be more than enough to set the precautionary alarm bells ringing. Five minutes of reading or listening would have revealed Ashraf Islam’s surrender to the authorities as almost certainly not the culmination of a well planned regicidal plot.

If I had to speculate wildly as to why Townley has handed himself in to police it would be either because he has once again fallen on hard times and wants three squares and a bed at the taxpayers expense. Or perhaps he’s trying to put himself beyond the reach of his creditors, not all of whom are always entirely innocent themselves. Linking himself indirectly to the Woolwich attack would simply appeal to Mark’s twisted sense of the theatric.

Put all of those facts together and you haven’t got a story. But put the picture I took of Townley in 2012 together with the scant known facts of the story and suddenly you’ve got a REALLY good story. Well you haven’t actually. What you have is a set of islamophobic assumptions feeding the prejudices of your audience. So rotten spoilsport that I am I declined permission for the photo to be used. I didn’t want to be even peripherally involved with giving some twit with a racist grudge ammunition for their ignorance.

I offered all who had asked the use of alternative photos of Mark. Free, gratis and for nothing too, generous soul that I am. Only he doesn’t have a beard in any of them. Nobody took me up on the offer.

Now why do you think that is?

The employees, some of whom have already lost their jobs, are most immediately to blame for the treatment of the children featured. But what role might the business model of these crèches play in what happened? Poorly paid staff in some instances supervising too many children on behalf of employers earning several multiples more than them.

The frontline staff were the people who must take the most immediate responsibility for what we saw on our screens – but you can’t divorce their actions from the conditions of their employment.

15% turnover of staff every month across the industry should tell you all you need to know about the terms and conditions of employment in creches, as well as the experience and qualifications of those applying for jobs in the sector. 25% have no qualification or prior experience for what is a skilled job.

But even when job applicants have a qualification (Fetac level 5 or better) two of the creches in the Prime Time programme – Links and Giraffe – were only offering minimum wage. Less that €9 an hour when according to the companies office accounts for 2010 the directors of Giraffe awarded themselves an average €110,000. That’s six times what they paid their staff.

One of the revealing things about the business model is the way the directors of one of the companies – Giraffe – went about pitching for venture capital. I discussed this in some detail in my Drivetime report here. In trying to convince investors that labour costs and regulation wouldn’t subtract from the bottom line they likened the childcare business to the burgeoning gym and leisure centre sector. Increased economies of scale would said one of the directors to the Sunday Business Post would make Giraffe’s facilities “more financially rewarding”.

In other words “big is beautiful”. Clearly it wasn’t in the cases of Little Harvard, Links or Giraffe. That is not to say that what Prime Time and reporter Oonagh Smyth uncovered in these three big chains isn’t also happening in smaller creches and pre-schools too. However, one of the fundamental principles of early childhood care is “small is best”. Small groups, that allow for a lot of one on one attention. A small number of facilities in any business presumably makes more direct proprietor management possible too. Hopefully the directors of big chains of can put this small prnciple at the heart of their business models from now on.

Is this a picture of a news event that should be reported on the front pages of national dailies and at the top of every news bulletin?

Or is this agit-prop that should properly be confined to the murkier depths of the internet?

Whether these men prove ultimately to be mentally ill, or sophisticated domestic Jihadis they showed a very good grasp of how the media would respond to their atrocity. So who was playing who? Something I mulled over in this radio report Podcast here.