Ep. 46 Dark Money
The Tip Off
The Tip Off
4.7 • 650 Ratings
🗓️ 11 September 2020
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Peter Geoghegan is standing on a train station platform when he sees it - a large advert in a free-sheet newspaper that will set him off on an investigation into the dark world of campaign spending.
In this episode we hear how he worked to unravel the secrets behind the Brexit campaigning by Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party - as he attempts to follow their funding to the source.
Read all about it:
Peter’s book Democracy For Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics is out now https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Peter-Geoghegan/Democracy-for-Sale--Dark-Money-and-Dirty-Politics/24069555
Hosted and produced: Maeve McClenaghan
Theme music: Dice Muse
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The spark of inspiration for an investigation can hit at any time. |
| 0:10.0 | In a regular interview, reading between the lines of a newspaper story, or even on a blustery railway platform. |
| 0:18.0 | I'm Maeve McLenigan. Welcome back to the Tip-Off. I'm Peter Gagan and I'm the |
| 0:26.4 | Dark Money Investigations editor at Open Democracy. Peter has worked in many different roles over the |
| 0:32.0 | years for a variety of outlets. But back in 2016, he was working as a freelancer, writing predominantly for the Irish |
| 0:40.1 | Times, while also teaching journalism at the University of the West of Scotland. It was the run-up to |
| 0:47.1 | the EU referendum, and Peter found himself travelling across the UK, reporting on the campaigns |
| 0:53.1 | being run by both sides of the debate. |
| 0:56.5 | One day, he was standing on the platform at a train station when something interesting caught |
| 1:01.8 | his eye. |
| 1:03.0 | Well, this whole story began on the 21st of June 2016, so more than four years ago. |
| 1:09.6 | And it was two days before the Brexit referendum. And I was |
| 1:12.7 | standing at a train station called Seaborne, which is just on the outskirts of Sunderland. |
| 1:18.3 | And at the time I was reporting for the Irish Times and I was in Sunderland just doing the kind |
| 1:23.2 | of reporter's job that you do a few days before a big election or a big vote, trying to take the |
| 1:27.8 | temperature, I'd spent a couple of days going around talking to voters, seeing what they taught at the |
| 1:32.0 | European Union, seeing how they're going to vote in the upcoming referendum, and just trying to |
| 1:35.8 | get the kind of get the temperature of Sunderland, no big investigation, just talking to people. |
| 1:40.8 | But I was standing on the train station, waiting for the train to come to kind of take me up, |
| 1:49.0 | take me back to Newcastle and up to Glasgow where I live. And I noticed on the platform there was a free sheet, the metro newspaper, and a big advert on the front of a big wraparound advert, |
| 1:53.3 | the whole way around it. And it just said take back control. It was all in blue. And I was like, oh yeah, that's the devote leave slogan, take back control. And I just picked it up and had a look at it. |
| 2:01.3 | But on the back of the advert, on the back page was the logo, the linehead logo, of the Democratic Unionist Party, the Northern Irish Union's Party. |
... |
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