For much of the Troubles, from the 1970s until the 1990s, Harris worked in Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) and was influential in shaping the current affairs output of Ireland's national broadcaster.
He was sacked after admitting to running a fake Twitter account,[2] which harassed journalists he believed were sympathetic to Irish nationalism and Sinn Féin.
[citation needed] According to Henry Patterson in his book The Politics of Illusion, Harris's pamphlet Irish Industrial Revolution (1975) was influential in shifting the party away from republicanism.
This was the prelude to a bigger split in 1992 when senior members alleged that the supposedly moribund Official IRA still existed and was implicated in criminality, and sought to move to some extent in the direction proposed earlier by Harris.
[9] The tensions within the organisation, between journalists such as Mary McAleese and Alex White on one side and the Workers' Party members on the other, led to major disagreements at the station and to criticism of what was perceived as its anti-republican political agenda.
However, he received criticism from both within and outside the party in April 1991, when he wrote the script for a sketch for the Fine Gael Ardfheis in which a cleaner (played by the comedy actress Twink) interrupted the leader's speech.
The sketch was criticised as being in bad taste and tacky, particularly in its references to a controversial incident that had made the news, wherein a female reporter from RTÉ had allegedly been groped by an inebriated Fianna Fáil TD.
Harris urged the Irish government, at the time led by his friend John Bruton, to end all support for Hume's peace efforts.
Having coined the phrase "Fellow-travellers" regarding the Hume-Adams strategy which involved Trade Union negotiatiors from the ROI, the Redemptorist Order and the Fianna Fáil party he refused to withdraw any comments following the death of Hume.
[citation needed] Harris gave media training to Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi in advance of the invasion of Iraq, and wrote in the Irish Independent that: I first met Chalabi in Washington in March 2001, in the company of Richard Perle, a few months after George W Bush had been elected, and met later in London where I gave him some media training.
[17] In 1997, Harris denounced Fianna Fáil presidential candidate Mary McAleese, calling her a "tribal time bomb" and writing "if she wins not on a technicality but because so many people gave her their number one, then I am living in a country I no longer understand."
Some alleged that the Sunday Independent's editorial stance prior to the election amounted to a U-turn from previous criticism of the government, but Harris explicitly denied there had been any U-turn or that the attitude of journalists at the paper was influenced by an alleged meeting between the deputy leader of Fianna Fáil, Brian Cowen and the owner of Independent News & Media, Tony O'Reilly.
Where Fintan O'Toole denied Harris's claims of a campaign by The Irish Times against Ahern, and accused the Sunday Independent of having its own political agenda.
On the RTÉ Radio 1 programme News at One on 3 December 2007, Harris strongly defended Bertie Ahern, saying that the Irish Daily Mail was a "lying newspaper", which practised "sensationalist, sick journalism" and which had a "record of fascist appeasement in the 1930s".
In a debate with Fintan O'Toole on the RTÉ TV Primetime programme on 4 December 2007, Harris further alleged that "the entire [Mahon] Tribunal is a fantasy of [Tom] Gilmartin".
[22] During an interview with Ursula Halligan on the TV3 programme The Political Party broadcast on 9 December 2007, Harris threatened to walk out because he did not wish to further discuss Bertie Ahern's appearances at the Mahon Tribunal.
Harris worked at Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), the Irish national television broadcaster, on current affairs programmes such as 7 Days and Féach.
In 2004, an angry RTÉ viewer, Kilmacud Crokes player Hugh Gannon, confronted Harris regarding the Sunday Independent's editorial.
[citation needed] In 2008, Harris defended the Irish-language poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh, who admitted buying gifts for and having sex with 16 to 18-year-old boys while on charitable visits to Nepal.
Harris pointed out that Ó Searcaigh's sexual preference was common among the great philosophers of Ancient Greece, and that the age of consent in Nepal is 16.
[25] In 2011, Harris voiced strong antagonistic views towards the Croke Park Agreement, arguing that the levels of pay it guarantees to public sector workers are "choking social solidarity".
In 2012 RTÉ upheld a complaint against a Praxis documentary, An Tost Fada (The Long Silence), written and narrated by Harris, and produced and directed by Gregg.
[27] The programme subject matter concerned Harris's controversial belief that some actions in the Irish War of Independence were sectarian, and involved the IRA targeting Protestants.
in The Sunday Times (Irish edition) that Harris was at the centre of an internal investigation at the National Film School in Dún Laoghaire, where he lectures.
[citation needed] Harris has also incorrectly, albeit accidentally, said he received a Silver Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival in his entry in 'Who's Who' in Ireland, for his documentary Darkness Visible.
[citation needed] Harris also wrote seven screenplays for Sharpe, which starred Sean Bean and Daragh O'Malley, the ITV adaptation of Bernard Cornwell's Napoleonic War historical fiction series.
[citation needed] On 6 May 2021 it was announced that his contract with the Sunday Independent had been terminated: this action was taken after he admitted using a fake Twitter account, under the name "Barbara J.
She observed, "For anyone who hasn’t seen it, the stated purpose of @WhigNorthern is to track Sinn Fein’s “subversive influence on Irish media.” Over the last year, it first targeted me directly by name: “Francine Cunningham has always been at the extreme end of radical nationalist politics” and claimed I was the ex-wife of someone I have never met who was also deemed to be suspect.”[34] On 15 April 2021 Twitter was threatened with legal action by lawyers acting for journalist and novelist Paul Larkin if the company did not reveal the owner or owners of the Pym account.
[35][36] Larkin was attacked by 'Barbara J. Pym' on 29 March and by an associated 'Dolly White' account, when the Irish Times published his review of Brendan O'Leary's three-volume A Treatise on Northern Ireland.
[40] Sworn enemies wished him well, with Fergus Finlay writing in the Irish Examiner: "Eoghan Harris’s self-aggrandisement might drive me nuts at times, but contrary as he is, his would be a voice that we would all miss if it was forced to be quiet for too long".