MATT COOPER APPEARED to be taken aback on his Today FM show yesterday evening when Fianna Fáil TD Niall Collins revealed that he too has received media training from Ivan Yates.

Cooper asked the question of Collins after he made a rather punchy remark on The Last Word.

Yates, a former Fine Gael minister, provided around four hours of media training to Fianna Fáil candidate Jim Gavin during the presidential election.

Today, Fianna Fáil Minister James Lawless said that he and other Fianna Fáil TDs attended a training session provided by Yates in 2021.

Yates was also a co-host of the Path To Power podcast with Cooper but is no longer involved with the podcast in the wake of the revelations of his involvement with Gavin’s campaign.

Cooper this week said he “came to a decision that it wasn’t appropriate for the listeners not to know about what work he had done from Jim Gavin when he was providing commentary on Jim Gavin”.

Matt Cooper and Ivan Yates pictured together in 2017.

On The Last Word on Today FM yesterday evening, Cooper had Collins and Sinn Féin TD Matt Carthy on to discuss the alleged arson attack at a centre for asylum seekers in Drogheda.

Towards the end of the segment, Carthy remarked that the public wants to “see an end to the blatant profiteering that is happening within the IPAS system”.

Collins said Carthy “continually wants to denigrate service providers to the Irish State”.

He added: “There are people out there who are contracted to the State to provide an IPAS service and Matt keeps calling these people ‘profiteers’, but in the real world, when people provide a service to the government, they have to be paid for it.”

When Cooper asked if people were being “paid appropriately when some of them have become multi-millionaires on the back of the provision”, Collins said: “There isn’t an enterprise in Ireland that seeks to operate on the basis of making a loss or of being a charity to the State.”

He then added: “Matt Carthy won’t understand this; there’s a basic principle in business: Turnover for vanity and profit for sanity.

“So Matt likes to quote the turnover figures which are paid to IPAS centres… IPAS centres cost the people who run them for the State a lot of money.”

Before wrapping up the segment, Cooper quipped: “With points like the one you made there about turnover and profit, you didn’t receive coaching for interviews from Ivan Yates did you, like some of your senior Cabinet ministers?”

“I actually have,” replied Collins to a taken aback Cooper.

“Sorry, it’s not some big reveal Matt,” said Collins, to which Cooper replied: “It is to me.”

Collins added: “Yates is one of many media coaches that I would have had the opportunity to avail of over the years.

“It’s no big deal and I think he’s actually a very, very fine media coach, and I have no hesitation in recommending him to anybody.”

Collins went on to remark that this “certainly is not an issue which is dominating public discourse when I go about my business in my constituency”.

“He coaches people in how to articulate the points that they want to make, he doesn’t formulate the message,” added Collins.

Somewhat coincidentally, the next item on Cooper’s Today FM show was a discussion with Gary Murphy, professor of politics at Dublin City University, to discuss the controversies surrounding Yates.

When Cooper asked Murphy to inform listeners on the latest developments regarding Yates, Murphy said: “Well, we’ve just heard Niall Collins reveal that Yates had been coaching him, which came as a bit of a shock to you and certainly to me listening in.”

Elsewhere, Newstalk has said a review is under way after Yates presented a programme on its airwaves on three dates during the presidential election campaign and did not inform it of “any conflict of interest”.

The media regulator said it had contacted Newstalk and RTÉ about the issue.

RTÉ said Yates appeared on the election results programme on 10 June 2024, as a panellist on 4 November 2024, and on a general election results programme on 30 November, but that he did not disclose his association with Fianna Fáil.