Last night, I had the unfortunate responsibility of informing Social Democrats TD Gary Gannon that he had been taken in by a right-wing hoax. Gannon posted, on Bluesky and Instagram, a screenshot of a 2011 itinerary – featuring a meeting with then-Minister for Justice Alan Shatter – supposedly from the Epstein Files released by the US Department of Justice. The screenshot was accompanied by a statement calling for full transparency around this alleged meeting between Epstein and Shatter.
That itinerary, a screenshot of which I’ve reproduced below, is in fact from the September 2011 calendar of former US Attorney General Eric Holder:
Gannon immediately deleted both posts when I informed him of his error.
For the avoidance of doubt: there is absolutely zero evidence that Alan Shatter and Jeffrey Epstein have ever met or had contact of any kind, and Alan Shatter’s name does not appear anywhere in the Epstein Files. This is easily checked as the Epstein Files are searchable on the US Department of Justice’s website and have been made even more searchable on a variety of third-party platforms, my favourite of which is JMail. You can also find Eric Holder’s speech at the IIEA online.
The screenshot he shared – in which the first three letters of Alan Shatter’s name are highlighted in blue – and the claim that this was Jeffrey Epstein’s itinerary both originated just over a month ago with a right-wing “news” account on X called The Flare (@TheFlareNews). Though they’ve since deleted their tweet of 28th December containing the claim, it has continued to circulate on social media in the weeks since, and I would note it has spread fairly effectively among left, right and centre alike.
The Flare is one of countless “news” accounts on social media these days that have somehow managed to convince thousands of peoples they are legitimate news outlets and not just social media accounts by having the appearance of an account run by some trendy online magazine. But take a look for a second, and you realise there is no The Flare website where they publish their “news” before sharing it to social media, and you cannot name its authors or contact its editors, because those things would expose whoever runs it to the unacceptable risk of ever being held accountable. There are a truly mindboggling number of accounts like this across social media that vast swathes of people seem to passively accept as reliable news sources without checking.
I’m generally minded to have a good deal of sympathy for people taken in by hoaxes, but I think a little common sense goes a long way with this one. Jeffrey Epstein was certainly able to maintain high-level friendships and access to elite realms of finance and politics after his 2008 conviction, but there is no reality in which Jeffrey Epstein was having a family dinner with the US Ambassador to Ireland and his wife at their official residence in 2011. Similarly, while I have a lot of pointed questions for the Institute of International and European Affairs, the idea that he was giving a speech, followed by a Q&A, at an IIEA event in 2011 is preposterous.
And let me say this clearly: it is just as absurd to imagine that Alan Shatter would have met with him as Minister for Justice. I have no grá whatsoever for Shatter, and heartily mocked him for spending more money than any other independent candidate in the last general election only to lose very, very badly. But absolutely nothing in his history as a public figure would lead me to suspect he had contact with Jeffrey Epstein ever, let alone that he did so as Minister for Justice, or that he’d involve the Secretary General of the Department of Justice in it. The only reason I can see that anyone would imagine he might is that he and Epstein are both Jewish and broadly supportive of Israel, though I’d say that Shatter is considerably more ideological in the latter regard and the notion that Epstein was an Israeli asset is kind of overblown.
I’m far from an expert on the Epstein mega-scandal, but I’ve followed it reasonably closely for over six years now, and the focus on the most lurid and sensationalistic elements of his life and crimes have resulted in a somewhat distorted picture of who Jeffrey Epstein was and what he did for a living. He was undoubtedly a prolific rapist and abuser of both children and women, a groomer and sex trafficker who preyed on vulnerable people and procured victims for friends and associates. Nothing else I say in this piece is intended to minimise that evil or diminish the suffering of those he harmed.
But if we are to understand Jeffrey Epstein’s place in the world, we must understand the sexual crimes he committed and enabled were just one component of the larger quasi-criminal enterprise that was his professional life. “Jeff Epstein, the New York financier?” is an incredibly funny bit, but also, yes, Epstein was a financier and the main service he seemed to offer the rich and powerful while ingratiating himself with them was help with their money. Moving it, hiding it, investing it, avoiding taxes on it. This was the gateway service, if you like, that Epstein used to bring people into his orbit and gain their confidence. He would then leverage these connections to make further connections, and thereby became an informal broker of power, bringing people he knew together to create financial and political opportunities. The sex trafficking appears to have been a more bespoke service for his closest associates.
I have no doubt that, in this position, Jeffrey Epstein collaborated with elements of multiple intelligence agencies, including Mossad, but calling him an Israeli asset in particular is a misunderstanding of the kind of operator he was. He was, for all intents and purposes, an independent contractor pursuing his own empowerment and enrichment according to his own agenda. Who he chose to work with is hardly arbitrary, but it is not indicative of any strong ideological persuasion or loyalty to any cause or nation. The truth is that there are literally thousands of people like Epstein in the world: fixers and brokers to the wealthy and powerful, who buy influence with favours and use information as currency, who move through the realms of the elite leveraging their connections for both personal and political motives, making and breaking alliances, quietly shaping the course of events while remaining imperceptible to the public.
These people are not agents of any grand conspiracy, but private functionaries of power itself, people who exist to fulfil the elite demand for someone to get things done and make things happen for them.
All of which serves to highlight another reason why I can’t imagine Epstein and Shatter meeting: Jeffrey Epstein was a collector of powerful and influential people, and Alan Shatter isn’t the kind of politician that Epstein liked to collect. I plan to explore this topic in more detail in future writing on Epstein, but for now, I will just say that Epstein liked to collect people of global renown, particularly from the worlds of finance, science and international politics. His most valued friends in politics – George Mitchell, Ehud Barak, Terje Rød-Larsen, Miroslav Lajčák, Peter Mandelson – are largely people with significant diplomatic and foreign affairs experience. Alan Shatter is a disgraced national politican who served an ignominious three-year term in government. He is now a member of the Israel Council on Foreign Relations, but he didn’t join until years after Epstein died. I would be shocked if Jeffrey Epstein even knew he was.
In fact, I can only definitively place two Irish politicians in a room with Jeffrey Epstein: Bertie Ahern and John Hume. Ahern hosted the 2002 Summit of Achievement in Dublin, which I understand to be an elite networking event where already wealthy, famous and powerful people give each other awards for being wealthy, famous and powerful. One of the honourees that year was John Hume, alongside David Trimble for their work on the Northern Irish peace process. We know that Jeffrey Epstein attended the event as it’s where former President of Colombia Andrés Pastrana Aranga says he met Epstein, something that Ghislaine Maxwell has confirmed, and which aligns with the few records we have of Epstein’s jet landing in Ireland. If any other Irish politicians were in attendance, I don’t know about it.
I cannot possibly say whether Epstein spoke with either Bertie Ahern or John Hume at the event, though I expect he at least tried to speak with Hume since Epstein seemed to have some interest in the Northern Irish peace process as a potential model for a resolution to the Israel/Palestine conflict. I’m still in the process of examining Irish connections in the Epstein Files, but a surprising amount of it reflects a clear interest in the topic, as do his friendships with George Mitchell and Peter Mandelson. He also appears to have known former NI Secretary Shaun Woodward through Ghislaine Maxwell, though they misspell his name as Sean Woodward in their emails and Epstein amusingly seemed to think he was the former Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. As with so many topics, Epstein’s interest does not seem to have been matched with a more than superficial understanding.
There are certainly some potentially interesting threads regarding Ireland in the Epstein Files and I look forward to pulling on them. As of right now though, my overwhelming impression is of Ireland as (1) a place that Epstein, and potentially his victims, passed through on their way to other places without lingering very long, and (2) a place that Epstein likely had money invested. That may well change, and I am not dismissing out of hand the widely-reported email regarding an alleged victim who may have been trafficked to and/or from Ireland. But I would also caution everyone to excercise an enormous sense of responsiblity about interpreting these documents, especially those that aren’t records of communications and often lack obvious context for why they are even in the Epstein Files. It does not diminish survivors to have a reasonable degree of skepticism, and it’s incredibly important, particularly in an Irish context, to not muddy the waters with reckless public speculation about potential future criminal prosecutions.
When it comes to that email, I feel like it would be especially prudent to exercise caution because it is the partial details of an alleged victim’s anonymised account paraphrased by a second party and conveyed to a third party with ambiguous language and what seem to me confused details.
For my part, I expect all the most interesting connections between Epstein and Ireland are located in the reams upon reams of financial documents that suggest he at least considered investing in private equity firms and funds based in Ireland. Transactions involving him certainly passed through Irish branches of international banks. If this seems boring, it kind of is, but it’s also vital. Full identification of assets are necessary for victims to claim compensation from them, and studying how Epstein managed his money is likely to be instructive in identifying assets he managed for other people and learning more about how operators like him manage money for the wealthy and powerful more broadly.
Also, as long as I’m fact-checking Epstein and Ireland stuff, I would note that, contrary to The Journal’s reporting on this, you actually can tell who the text messages about Irish people having “horrible asses” were sent by and to. Not in all versions, but many documents in the Epstein Files appear multiple times in different formats with varying levels of redaction.
It was Jeffrey Epstein himself, speaking to Miroslav Lajčák, who slandered our backsides.
Left in the Lurch 