Free The Trib by David Kenny Page B

into the trap of using Katy as a role model. The aid organisation GOAL recently sent Katy French, the model, to Calcutta, where aid workers strive to alleviate poverty and rescue child prostitutes from the sex industry.
    Do you really want to hear a model talking about her sex toys and sexual exploits one week and telling you about the plight of the Third World the next?
    The use of Katy French by GOAL to garner some cheap publicity could be seen as compromising and it does devalue the real and valid work of the organisation. But perhaps modern society encourages such stunts because we want to hear how the trip affected the celebrity rather than the real issues behind the ongoing and dire poverty they experience.
    Katy French is a free woman in a democratic country and her views are as valid as those of the next person. I’d imagine most of what she says is done with tongue firmly in cheek in order to elicit reaction. But if her crass pronouncements are read as an indicator of wider female opinion, it becomes damaging. Katy French is a female Irish model, not a model Irish female and should be treated by the media and others as such.

Media outpouring of false friendship is an insult to Katy
    9 December 2007
    O n Thursday night I sat looking at a newspaper photo of Katy French taken exactly a week earlier. That image was now tainted with another – that of her desperately sad death in a Co. Meath hospital surrounded by her family. This outspoken, but perhaps naïve, young woman whose antics had so irked me just weeks before was gone.
    French’s promotion by the media as a spokesperson for a generation prompted me to write in this paper about what she stood for. In a fairly hard-hitting piece, mostly directed at the organisations who exploited her for their own gain, I explained how I believed her deliberately provocative opinions were designed to buy her column inches and how the press fell for it every time. While I said I didn’t object to her making a good living out of it, I objected to the media holding her up as representative of Irish women and giving her views such a loud voice.
    Katy French’s honesty led her to a place where the very organisations she used to get her on the front page of every tabloid newspaper here were starting to turn on her. Her birthday party, held just over a week ago, was mocked and described as being more akin to a meeting of the National Union of Journalists than a birthday celebration. The list of high-profile people who weren’t there was published before the list of the attendees. It’s fair to say she began to be ridiculed; her policy of giving herself completely to the media was beginning to backfire.
    Until last week, media organisations continued to publish ever more daring photographs of Katy French and demanded ever more salacious soundbites. These were often accompanied by catty tales of gossip about her private life and her alleged cat-fights with her rivals.
    Indeed, in the wake of the personal comments she made about me in a Sunday newspaper, three tabloid journalists made contact asking for my response to the ‘outrageous’ and ‘disgusting’ attack.
    For the record, I didn’t regard the riposte as either outrageous or disgusting; it was amusing, and proved my substantive point. Since her death I have heard that she believed I wrote about her to garner publicity for myself. I wrote about her because I passionately believed young and vulnerable people were at risk of buying into the idea that it’s okay to recklessly say and do what you like, regardless of the consequences, and expect to be feted as a result.
    However, the news of her illness and subsequent death turned these journalistic foes into friends. The very journalists who took potshots at Ireland’s only glamour model now told us they considered themselves amongst her closest friends.
    In the sugar-coated tabloid world of celebrity reporting, friendship is a