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This is the real Peter Collins via RTÉ Press Office
Peter Collins

Peter Collins accounts cause Twitter storm… but they’re all fake

A number of accounts purporting to be those of the RTÉ Sport presenter are all fake it has emerged.

Update 1.25pm

A NUMBER OF Twitter accounts claiming to be RTÉ sports presenter Peter Collins are all fake it has been confirmed.

Last night, a number of accounts purporting to be the RTÉ Sport presenter and commentator popped up on Twitter but a spokesperson for RTÉ has told TheJournal.ie that they are all fake and that Collins is not on Twitter.

Most notable was @PeterCollinsRTE which had been active since August but last night posted a number of controversial tweets related to a debate on Tonight with Vincent Browne about travellers.

Those tweets were subsequently deleted and an apology was posted:

A number of other Peter Collinses popped up including @RealPCollinsRTE and @DaBigPC, neither of which seemed genuine unlike @RealPCollins who tweeted his displeasure at it all.

TheJournal.ie got in touch with RealPCollins who said he was “sort of sick of it all” but found the confusion over just who was the real Peter Collins “rather fun”.

In a series of Direct Messages he wrote:

A friend texted me last night to tell me. I’ve never had a twitter account before. So obviously I popped on to check what was going on.

As to why they keep appearing, who knows? Perhaps I seem a rather unlikely/modest figure to hoax! A colleague tells me it’s a compliment…

We were unable to confirm for definite it was him as he said he “didn’t want to be bothered by phone calls”.

“I need a bit of mystery in my life,” he went on to say before closing the account.

However a spokesperson for RTÉ confirmed to the TheJournal.ie this afternoon that “110 per cent none of the accounts are Peter Collins”. The spokesperson declined to comment on Collins’s reaction to their presence.

And there ends the mystery of Peter Collins on Twitter or not as it turns out.

Update 1: Yet another Peter Collins Twitter account has emerged today @UltimatePCRTE has tweeted to say: “So are all these fake versions of me the product of one person? One very sad person? Really pathetic. Nothing better to do?”

Update 2: The person behind this account told us to get in touch with him but we have once again confirmed with RTÉ that this is not Peter Collins and that he is not on Twitter.

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