That's no excuse for mis-selling a product ("if" that's what happened here). Anyone selling a product, especially a financial product, should have some basic knowledge about it and have leaflets outlining the main features including fees.
I think that Joe Duffy would know the difference but
@Leper I wouldn't make the allowance you would for the presenter of a programme on the national broadcaster. Making allowances for others isn't always a virtue. It's sometimes akin to "turning a blind eye".
JD is a very humane empathetic person and does a great job giving ordinary people a voice, but he's human and like us all he has his prejudices. Sometimes these prejudices result in bias and in treating some people and subjects poorly.
I recall the programme on 28th Jan this year (I know the date because I sent in a couple of complaint texts to the programme) where
@Brendan Burgess was ganged up on and Joe wasn't giving him a fair chance to put his points. The panel was at least 4 to one against Brendan. JD clearly had not been briefed to the great gratis work BB has done on behalf of consumers of financial products (ask the many oppressed customers of Irish Nationwide). BB didn't make allowances for "Fingers Fingleton". More recently on the Tracker issue it seems to me that he was the only one who believed that the banks could be forced to compensate the many people who had their Trackers changed to variable rate mortgages by slight of hand. He persevered and I think he won many many millions of Euro in compensation for consumers. The presenter of a national programme such as Liveline would have been aware of that (made aware of it by his backroom team) but allowed his bias and prejudice to enable him to "turn a blind eye" to it and take the easy and lazy "populist" position. As a result I would not trust his programme when covering a financial product and I guess that the Authority won't allow him to in future. But for lots of other consumer issues I think his programme does great work especially for vulnerable people.
I also remember back in 2014 at the time of the last Gaza war when over 2,000 Palestinians were killed (including 500 children). JD had an Irish Jewish doctor now living in Israel on the phone. This doctor, in defending Israeli actions among other stuff, said that when people are injured by a bomb in Israel he would also treat Arabs injured in the blast. Joe should have been aware that there are about 2 million Arabs that are citizens of Israeli and living in Israel proper. Joe should have asked the doctor "but why wouldn't you treat them aren't they just as much a citizen as you are"? This should have led to a discussion of whether Arab Israelis are in fact treated as full citizens. I'm only recounting this incident to make the point that JD is only human and in this case I'd "make allowance" for his lack of knowledge of Israel history. I've never heard his programme discuss the issue since. Like us all he can have an off day, get tired, lack sufficient knowledge of some subjects and have his biases.
