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FACTCHECK
Meet the team: The Journal's FactCheck unit
Here are the editors and reporters behind Ireland’s main factchecking outlet.
Updated on 01 May 2023
MEET THE TEAM of editors and reporters who work with the team here at The Journal FactCheck in 2023.
In alphabetical order:
CHRISTINE BOHAN
Deputy Editor of The Journal, Christine has led the day-to-day operations of FactCheck and innovated the unit’s Covid-19 Debunked Project in early 2020. She was executive producer for the award-winning Stardust podcast which exposed the facts behind the deaths of 48 young people in a nightclub fire in Ireland in 1981. She was selected for the Poynter Institute’s Leadership Academy for Women in Media in 2018. She previously worked at The Guardian on the comment desk and as a freelance news features journalist for The Irish Times and The Sunday Tribune. She is an occasional lecturer in journalism at Dublin City University. Christine is currently on maternity leave and Assistant News Editor Stephen McDermott is currently leading day-to-day operations on FactCheck.
LAUREN BOLAND
Lauren is the climate crisis reporter with The Journal. She first joined the team as a Google News Initiative Fellow, a programme run by the European Journalism Centre to select 40 fellows to work in newsrooms around Europe. In 2020, she was shortlisted in the National Print/Online category of the Headline Mental Health Media Awards for her work countering misinformation shared on social media in Ireland on the reporting of deaths by suicide. She holds a BA in English Literature and Sociology from Trinity College Dublin and is currently a candidate in the Master of Science (MSc) programme at Dublin City University in Climate Change: Policy, Media and Society. Lauren has worked on a broad range of fact-checking projects with a particular focus on misinformation relating to Covid-19, and more recently on climate crisis disinformation.
DARAGH BROPHY
Daragh is News Editor at The Journal and has played a key role in planning and editing the publication’s fact-checks in recent years, including during the contentious 2018 abortion referendum campaign, the lead-up to the 2020 Irish general election and throughout the pandemic. Daragh has been a journalist at The Journal since 2013, and has a particular interest in covering long-running issues such as the fallout from Covid-19 and the ongoing housing and homelessness crisis. He previously worked as a reporter and newsreader for UTV Radio News and Independent Network News, and as a facilitator on FETAC further education courses.
SUSAN DALY
As Managing Editor of Journal Media, Susan is responsible for directing, innovating and developing content and distribution strategy for Ireland’s biggest news website, sports site The42 and the community-based investigative platform Noteworthy. Susan set up The Journal FactCheck in 2016 as a way to monitor the Irish general election and was responsible for the expansion and development of the project, which has been the only Irish signatory of the International Fact-Checking Network’s Code of Principles to this point in time. She directs all external partnerships for FactCheck including work on the European Fact-Check Standards Network (EFCSN) and the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) Ireland hub.
She is a Fellow of the Sulzberger Program for news executives in Columbia University and sits on the advisory group of the FuJo (Future of Journalism Institute) in DCU and the steering group of the non-profit Media Literacy Ireland. She is currently also contributing to the National Counter Disinformation Strategy in Ireland as a representative of the Press Ombudsman.
RÓNÁN DUFFY
Rónán is Assistant News Editor with The Journal and has been a journalist for over a decade, working across print, web, radio and television. His wide-ranging fact-checking experience extends to research in the areas of law, health, society, infrastructure, climate and policy. Rónán’s areas of interests include reporting in the political arena as well as covering criminal and commercial court proceedings. Prior to his current role, Rónán was a business journalist with Business & Finance magazine, a reporter with Xinhua News Agency and a reporter with Independent Network News. He holds a BA Journalism from Dublin City University.
CHRISTINA FINN
Christina is the political correspondent at The Journal. Before joining the team in 2012, she worked in a number of local and national newspapers. She holds a BA in English and Art History, an MA in International Journalism and an MA in Arts Management and Cultural Policy. She received a Justice Media Award for her court reporting from the Irish Family Courts, and has also received funding from the Mary Raftery Fund for investigative work into mental health issues in Ireland. Over the course of her career,
Based out of Leinster House, Ireland’s national parliament, Christina covers day-to-day politics for The Journal, and often highlights claims made by politicians, lobbyists and other public figures that she feels should be factchecked. She is a frequent contributor to national radio and television shows.
HAYLEY HALPIN
Hayley is a staff writer with The Journal. Her areas of interest include housing, homelessness and social affairs. She holds a BA in Journalism from Dublin City University, and has previously worked as a reporter for Dublin People and for The Irish Independent.
MICHELLE HENNESSY
Before joining The Journal team in 2013 as a staff reporter, Michelle worked for the Dublin bureaus of France 24 and the Xinhua news agency. In 2017 the Law Society of Ireland awarded Michelle a certificate of merit for her comprehensive fact-check on whether it was illegal for members of the Irish police force to go on strike.
Michelle’s journalistic interests are wide-ranging, but she focuses in particular on the criminal justice system, housing issues, health scandals and Irish politics. In the past year, she and her colleague Maria Delaney won the Irish Red Cross Journalism Excellence Award for their series of investigative pieces into the institutional challenges faced by children of the Irish Traveller community.
GARRETH MACNAMEE
Garreth has been a reporter with The Journal since 2016. His interests include crime, justice and social affairs. Prior to joining the team, he was the crime reporter for the Irish Mirror where he was nominated for Crime Story of the Year. Garreth has broken a number of major news stories at The Journal, including a series on a previously unexplored Lithuanian crime gang responsible for an acid attack on a serving garda. He also broke the story about the Church of Scientology expanding in Ireland and investigated how a woman’s rape claims against her father were shelved by gardaí for 11 years.
STEPHEN McDERMOTT
Stephen is Assistant News Editor with The Journal. He has been the day-to-day lead on FactCheck while Christine Bohan is on maternity leave (second half of 2022). He covers a range of issues in news, with a strong focus on misinformation, and has previously worked for Newstalk and the Irish Mirror. He is direct manager for FactCheck’s full-time fact-checker and liaises with the Managing Editor on FactCheck’s partnership with the Ireland EDMO hub (European Digital Media Observatory).
BRIANNA PARKINS
Brianna was full-time fact-checker at The Journal FactCheck until August 2022, when she left to complete a book project. She carried out a wide breadth of fact-checks for the unit, from disinformation circulating around the Ukraine conflict to false immigration narratives. She is an experienced journalist and was a broadcaster for Media Watch, a flagship fact-checking programme for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).
She hosted a misinformation panel featuring one of Ireland’s MEPs and the head of the Ireland EDMO hub for The Journal’s Good Information Project to a live audience in University College Cork in April of this year, and has spoken extensively about prebunking, debunking and how to acquire media literacy for online audiences to better sift through misinformation themselves.
SINÉAD O’CARROLL
Sinéad is Editor at The Journal and is responsible for the daily output of the website’s reporters, as well as longer term planning on projects including FactCheck. She has provided fact-checking services to nationwide television broadcasters, appearing frequently during the referendum on the Eighth Amendment in 2018. She was the winner of a Justice Media Award 2017 for providing historical context around the first tribunal to be established in Ireland in a decade. She is a regular contributor to news and current affairs shows across radio and TV, and has also hosted a number of programmes.
SHANE RAYMOND
Shane is FactCheck’s full-time fact-check journalist, surfacing misinformation trends in Ireland and providing fact-checks to correct that information. He is experienced in the use of digital fact-checking tools, with a wealth of bylines for his fact-checking and misinformation work in outlets such as The Times, The Sunday Times, Reuters, Al Jazeera, The Irish Times, The Japan Times, ABC7, Storyful, The Irish Examiner and The Sunday Business Post. His research has been published by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The Guardian, Vice News, Sky News, Euronews, Global News, The Straits Times, RTÉ and The Irish Independent.
Before coming on board The Journal FactCheck, Shane was an analyst for harmful content for misinformation tech specialists Kinzen, and worked previously for Reuters and social media verification company Storyful. He has a Master’s degree in International Journalism from TU Dublin.
NICKY RYAN
Nicky is a journalist and reporter with The Journal. He has an interest in factchecking a wide-range of topics in news and current affairs, as well as exploring ways to visualise the results. He is the writer of The Journal’s popular Covid-19 newsletter which also outlines themes of disinformation and misinformation in the public health space. He edits The Journal’s various podcast outputs, paying particular attention to the accuracy of the audio content.
ÓRLA RYAN
Órla is a senior reporter with The Journal who is particularly interested in human rights and social justice issues. She has written extensively about Mother and Baby Homes and women’s rights, and has just researched and presented a podcast series on the issue, Redacted Lives. Órla won the Journalism Excellence Award at the 2020 Irish Red Cross Humanitarian Awards for “a diverse body of work highlighting humanitarian topics from all over the world”.
She is a double recipient of the Simon Cumbers Media Fund – for which she wrote a series of articles on FGM and gender-based violence in Kenya, and a series on the mental health issues faced by Syrian and Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. She is also a recipient of the Mary Raftery Journalism Fund – for which she wrote a series of in-depth articles about radicalisation, Islamophobia and integration. Órla has a Journalism MA from NUI Galway and a Communication Studies BA from Dublin City University.
All of our journalists are available by direct email in their byline section at the end of every article they write. You can also contact FactCheck by our factcheck@thejournal.ie email address, on Twitter @TJ_FactCheck or to our misinfo Whatsapp hotline on 085 221 4696.
The Journal’s FactCheck is a signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network’s Code of Principles. You can read it here. For information on how FactCheck works, what the verdicts mean, and how you can take part, check out our Reader’s Guide here.
