A classic AFL contest ended in ugly scenes at the MCG when Hawthorn supporters threw bottles towards the umpires after a disputed late decision in the Hawks’ preliminary-final clash with the Brisbane Lions.

Hawthorn’s season ended in preliminary-final heartbreak for the second year in succession, with Brisbane holding on for a 20.11 (131) to 19.8 (122) victory.

The decisive moment came with just 18 seconds remaining. Defender Jarman Impey was penalised for holding the ball, allowing Brisbane’s Hugh McCluggage to take a free kick and slot the goal that ultimately sealed the Lions’ place in the grand final.

A Fox Sports commentator described the ruling as “the biggest call you have ever seen”.

The decision prompted a huge backlash from the Hawthorn faithful, with loud boos echoing around the MCG before several bottles were thrown towards the umpires as they made their way from the field.

In one alarming moment, an official warned a colleague about an object flying towards them. The umpire ducked to avoid the bottle before pointing towards the suspected spectator so security could intervene.

“We’ve never seen bottles thrown on the ground like this before, have we? Have we ever seen a scene like this?” SEN broadcaster Dwane Russell asked.

Hawthorn premiership champion Luke Hodge also voiced his disapproval of the supporters’ behaviour.

“The umpires are walking off, they should not have things thrown at them. A bottle has come down from the top tier,” Hodge said.

The incident was widely condemned online, with one football fan posting: “Disgraceful. Should be life bans dished out.”

Another supporter wrote: “That’s not the way, boys. Not our night, but shouldn’t be doing that.”

A third added: “Embarrassing behaviour — no, disgraceful. The AFL needs to come down hard on this type of behaviour.”

Hawthorn captain James Sicily, Tom Barrass and Jack Ginnivan were also seen confronting the umpires in an animated exchange after the final siren.

Ruckman Lloyd Meek was visibly emotional and swore while speaking to reporters in the rooms. Coach Sam Mitchell, however, maintained his composure during a difficult post-match press conference, describing the loss as a moment of mourning.

“This feeling is the pits,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell said he was unaware of Sicily, Barrass and Ginnivan approaching the umpires, although he knew bottles had been thrown onto the field.

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“At the end of the game, part of me wanted to break down in tears, part of me wanted to scream with rage, part of me wanted to throw chairs — you don’t know how to react,” he said.

‘So when you’re in the stand, you need to continue to be feeling that emotion, because that’s why we love it, but how it manifests itself – we shouldn’t be throwing things on the field and doing those types of things.

‘But the passion in the stand and the passion of the game is why we love it so much. So I hope that for the vast majority it was felt responsibly.’

Meek was near Impey when the free was paid.

‘It’s heartbreaking… We pour our heart and soul into this. I was standing right next to him – I will be replaying that one for a while,’ Meek said.

‘I just feel like I probably could have jumped on and knocked the ball out or done a “stacks-on” – something … it’s hard, in the dying moments.’

Mitchell spoke of grief and added it was too soon to think beyond what had just happened.

‘I think we’re in a mourning phase. What’s the first part, is it anger? I think I’m still half in anger, probably sense it in my body language,’ he said.

‘What else, what’s after anger? I don’t know, last is acceptance and – I nearly said a bad word – I’m a long way from acceptance right now.

‘I will sit in anger for a bit longer, I’m sure all the players will too.’

Before they left the MCG for the last time this season, Mitchell brought his players into a tight group.

‘It was just, “Remember this”. There’s nothing more raw than that five minutes straight after the siren, when it hurts the most,’ Meek said of Mitchell’s message.

‘Remember the burn and the outrage and how frustrating it is – because that will be our fuel. We have a big pre-season ahead.’

Mitchell spoke of his great pride in the Hawks, who staged an outstanding comeback in the final quarter.

But in the end, it came to nothing.

‘If you want to strive for great things, you will open yourself up for all sorts of emotion, the greatest of joy, and the deepest of pain,’ he said.

The bakery at Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison has been shut down amid concerns that gangland figures were using it as a route for delivering drugs.

The disclosure appears in internal Irish Prison Service (IPS) documents obtained by the Irish Mail on Sunday under the Freedom of Information Act.

Mountjoy’s bakery had previously been held up as a model for prisons in other jurisdictions, including Hydebank Wood prison for women and young offenders in Belfast.

However, the FOI records describe the bakery, which supplies bread to prisons across Dublin, as a known ‘channel for contraband’.

The description was included in an October 2024 email from Mary Leydon, a governor in the IPS Human Resources Directorate.

Her email was sent while IPS management and staff were negotiating the bakery’s closure.

Alongside identifying the facility as a source of contraband, Ms Leydon said it had been linked to ‘H&S [health and safety] concerns over the years’, adding that management had raised ‘serious concerns’.

‘This was a challenging negotiation process but we believe after years attempting it, we have finally achieved its closure,’ Ms Leydon wrote.

She said the shutdown would take place ‘on phased basis over 12-18 months’, allowing other prisons time to secure an alternative supplier.

The decision to close the bakery was first disclosed publicly in the Dáil a year later, in November 2025, by Justice Minister Jim O’Callaghan.

Mr O’Callaghan did not mention specific contraband concerns, but referred generally to the ‘enhanced security’ that would result from the closure.

Replying to a parliamentary question from Sinn Féin TD Matt Carthy, Mr O’Callaghan said supplying bread to Dublin’s prisons through Mountjoy’s bakery cost €660,000 a year—€110,000 more than using a commercial provider.

He said the bakery would instead become ‘a training facility to deliver certified training in baking skills to people in custody.’

Several high-profile prisoners have worked in the Mountjoy bakery over the years, including convicted boom-time thief Michael Lynn and Mr Moonlight murderer Patrick Quirke. There is no suggestion that either man was involved in moving contraband through the facility.

Prison sources said the bakery was regarded as a highly sought-after job among inmates. Located on the same footprint as the kitchen, just off E Division, its goods gate is about 30 to 40 metres from Mountjoy’s main entrance.

‘The bakery in Mountjoy would have been something that was highly successful back in the day,’ one officer told the MoS.

‘It produced a lot of good bread and a lot of work for prisoners as well. It gave them something useful to be doing.’

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But the bakery was also known as a weak link that gangs were able to manipulate to get drugs and phones into Mountjoy.

‘All the stuff coming in from suppliers is not always checked by dog units and search teams,’ another officer told the MoS.

He added that the loading bay doors for food deliveries to the bakery and kitchen were not always appropriately locked.

‘If you’re bringing in something – especially a substance such as white flour – it can become very easy to bring in something extra, and that was always the problem with it,’ they said.

‘Everybody knew the stuff was coming in via deliveries. Prisoners had been caught removing drugs from the underside of delivery trucks and so on.’

The sources told how service lifts in the loading bay and food preparation areas can be used to distribute drugs further into the depths of the prison once they are delivered to the bakery.

The scale of this smuggling can be judged by a successful, intelligence-led operation implemented by the IPS in 2020.

In November that year, the largest haul of contraband ever intercepted was found hidden in bags of sugar and sprinkled with coffee to confuse sniffer dogs.

The consignment, hidden as part of a food truck delivery, included drugs, alcohol, phones and SIM cards.

In all 10,000 tablets, bags of cocaine, cannabis, 30 phones, SIM cards, bottles of whiskey, steroids and an exercise band were discovered.

So successful was this smuggling route, that gangs were able to supply contraband to order to individual prisoners.

This is evident by the manner in which drugs packages were individually wrapped with prisoners’ names on them.

According to gardaí at the time’ the cocaine had an estimated value of €140,000, the tablets were valued at €20,000, and the cannabis was worth €5,000.

Speaking at the time of the seizure, IPS Director General, Caron McCaffrey, said: ‘There were 600 boxes, with each being painstakingly taken off the truck and searched, and it was in the middle of the last pallet of items, that it was detected, in two boxes which purported to be sugar but when those boxes are opened, they contained a very significant amount of contraband.’

Ms McCaffrey said the drugs could have resulted in deaths among the prisoner population had they made their way into Mountjoy.

‘They certainly result in inter-prisoner violence and it can also result in assaults against our staff, specifically given the content and… it undoubtedly would have resulted in very significant overdoses and potentially deaths within the prison population.’

An IPS spokesperson told the MoS: ‘The Irish Prison Service does not comment on security or operational matters’.

Australian journalists are increasingly alarmed that Pauline Hanson no longer appears intimidated by them—assuming she ever was. More concerning, however, is the question of why so many Australians have lost faith in journalists.

Concern is mounting across the Fourth Estate after One Nation began excluding certain journalists from its events.

At a press conference at Crown Melbourne last week, reporters from the ABC and The Guardian were told to leave and escorted from the venue by hotel security. The Age has also been refused entry to One Nation events.

Some newsrooms have warned that barring journalists establishes a dangerous precedent in an otherwise healthy democracy. One Nation’s strategy may indeed be misguided. Hanson is certainly capable of facing tough questions, even if she responds in a way that differs from the standard approach of a conventional politician.

If One Nation hopes to replace the Coalition as Labor’s principal alternative, it must accept the greater scrutiny that ambition brings. Yet there is another aspect of the dispute that journalists seem far less willing to examine. The media is calling on Hanson to reflect on her conduct while showing little inclination to do the same itself.

Take the event from which the ABC and The Guardian were excluded. One Nation’s Victorian leader, Warren Pickering, used the occasion to publicly acknowledge that he had taken illegal drugs and had lost his licence several times for drink-driving offences when he was younger.

Regardless of one’s view of Pickering or his disclosures, it is hard to portray a press conference focused on revealing the most humiliating chapters of a politician’s past as an effort to evade scrutiny. The Australian, which first reported the story, was permitted to attend.

The excluded outlets were not prevented from reporting on, investigating or criticising One Nation. They continued to cover the matter extensively. Calling their exclusion “censorship” pushes the term well beyond its proper meaning.

Censorship stops journalists from publishing. It involves the state using its authority to suppress information or punish those who disclose it. Refusing entry to a privately organised media event is something else entirely: it withdraws privileged access, but does not remove press freedom.

Nor should anyone pretend that political parties do not routinely manage media access. Politicians offer exclusives to preferred reporters, leak material to sympathetic outlets and give selected journalists advance notice of announcements. Embargoed briefings, background discussions and carefully timed “drops” are all used to influence coverage. I know because, over the years, I have experienced every one of these tactics.

Reporters who cooperate with the system are rewarded with access. Those who create difficulties may find that calls go unanswered, interviews vanish and stories are handed to rival outlets.

The threat of freezing out journalists has been a feature of politics for decades. Governments are especially well placed to do it because they control such a vast supply of information. They seldom need to impose an official ban; the punishment can be delivered quietly. I have encountered that as well, on several occasions.

The ABC itself has previously characterised political “drops” as a familiar media-management technique—one journalists often accept and even welcome, despite the hidden agendas and conditions that can accompany them.

When the major parties ration information in this manner, it is described as media management. When One Nation does the same thing openly, it is presented as an existential danger to democracy. That is difficult to take seriously.

The major parties use a velvet glove; One Nation uses hotel security guards. In large part, the distinction is simply how discreetly the pressure is applied.

That does not make One Nation’s conduct more or less acceptable. It does, however, expose the media’s reaction as selective and inconsistent.

Some journalists hold an idealised view of the Fourth Estate that no longer reflects the way the industry actually operates.

Thomas Jefferson is frequently cited as a champion of the press. In 1787, he wrote that if forced to choose between “a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government”, he would choose the latter.

It’s a magnificent endorsement of press freedom.

But Jefferson didn’t regard newspapers as inherently virtuous. Twenty years later, after experiencing their excesses, he wrote that ‘nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper’. He understood something that is often lost in the present debate: a free press is essential, but that doesn’t make it infallible.

The modern media bears little resemblance to the institution journalists evoke when defending the sanctity of the Fourth Estate. It is fragmented, financially under pressure and increasingly driven by outrage, clicks and ideological affinities. That’s fine, but it means that the boundaries between reporting, analysis and activism have become blurred.

Social media rewards speed and fury rather than accuracy or proportion. Newsrooms increasingly speak to narrow audiences whose political instincts they already understand. Too many journalists mistake the prevailing opinions inside their own professional and social circles for the settled views of the country, and they couldn’t be more wrong. Especially gallery journalists confined to the Canberra bubble.

Trust in the media has declined accordingly. The 2025 Digital News Report found that only 43 per cent of Australians generally trusted the news. Yet when politicians reject the authority of the media, many journalists respond as though their own conduct couldn’t possibly have contributed to the breakdown.

No Australian political figure has more reason to distrust the press than Pauline Hanson. For three decades, Hanson has faced legitimate and often necessary scrutiny. She’s made offensive remarks, promoted questionable candidates and advanced policies that deserved rigorous examination. But that isn’t the whole story.

She has also been subjected to relentless ridicule, exaggeration, selective reporting and personal contempt. Misquoted and taken out of context. At times, journalists have appeared less interested in understanding her support than in displaying their moral superiority to it.

Her voters have routinely been depicted as ignorant, racist or stupidly incapable of recognising their own interests. Every controversy has been presented as the event that must finally destroy her. The possibility that Hanson might identify genuine community concerns (even when her prescriptions are sometimes flawed) has too often been dismissed without serious examination.

She was even sent to prison for three months before her convictions were quashed. Whatever the media’s role in that saga, Hanson’s suspicion of powerful institutions didn’t emerge from nowhere.

The media has spent so long treating Hanson as beyond the bounds of respectable politics that many of her supporters automatically discount almost anything reported about her now.

Hanson has recognised that she no longer needs the mainstream media as she once did. Social media allows political parties to speak directly to millions of voters. Interviews can be live-streamed, announcements published in full and hostile coverage answered almost instantly.

Yes, that creates genuine dangers. Politicians can evade difficult questions, construct self-serving narratives and communicate inside closed ecosystems wherein they are rarely challenged.

But it also means journalists are no longer indispensable gatekeepers. Access is not an entitlement bestowed by membership of the profession, it has to be justified by the value journalism provides and the trust it earns.

In my view, One Nation should probably lift its bans. A party seeking national power should be prepared to face unfriendly journalists, and Hanson is strong enough to do so. But the media should resist turning this into another sermon about its own democratic virtue.

After three decades of helping create the distrust on which One Nation now thrives, many in the modern media should be willing to answer a few questions themselves.