Barry Hand

About a year ago, a few Irish rugby player pro­files were ‘van­dalised’ on Wikipedia, some of these were tongue in cheek addi­tions, rumoured to be added by the play­ers themselves.

Exam­ples of these were usu­ally tagged onto the end of the pro­file such as Shane Hor­gan and Jerry Flan­nery

This leads us to Leinster’s Gir­van Dempsey, who is fea­tured in the pub­li­ca­tion of Ire­lands Sport­ing Giants writ­ten by Ivan Mar­tin and pub­lished by Apple­tree Press. From the pub­lisher themselves :

Ireland’s Rugby Giants — That was the chal­lenge that faced Ivan Mar­tin when he wrote Ireland’s Rugby Giants, the lat­est book from Apple­tree Press.

Appar­ently not that chal­leng­ing as Ivan copied a van­dalised wikipedia entry from Gir­van Dempseys page.

The very obvi­ous cheeky addi­ton was taken from var­i­ous van­dolised ver­sions in the ‘away from rugby’ sec­tion — check ref­er­ences to jam mak­ing and dis­cov­er­ing flora and fauna, as well as dis­cov­er­ing new bird species!

The only expla­na­tion I can think of is that both the writer, and edi­tor didn’t read any of this or even ver­ify the claims or research any­thing about the player at all, which leads to the ques­tion — How on earth did this get published?

Wikipedia is a great resource, but bas­ing all of your research from one source is extremely bad journalism!