Jan Moir is disowned by the Irish Daily Mail

As the Jan Moir saga rumbles on, it turns out that the Daily Mail's Irish operation had to launch a damage limitation exercise at the weekend in order to distance itself from the comments made on the eve of Stephen Gately's funeral in the English version of the paper.

Both the Irish Mail on Sunday and the Irish Daily Mail printed disclaimers alongside their coverage of the Boyzone singer's funeral in Dublin on Saturday.

The statement read: "Comments made by journalist Jan Moir about Stephen Gately in her newspaper column caused controversy on Friday. Jan Moir's column has never been published in the Irish Daily Mail which, like the Irish Mail on Sunday, is edited and printed entirely in Ireland - independent of the UK titles - and does not have an online presence."

The move came as a wave of outrage greeted Moir’s column in which she wrote, among other things, that "there was nothing natural about Stephen Gately's death" and that the circumstances were "more than a little sleazy".

As a result, brands including M&S pulled ads from the paper's website and members of the public sent a record 21,000 complaints to the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) after Stephen Fry began a Twitter campaign against Moir, whom he described as a "repulsive nobody".

The paper's Irish edition was launched in February 2006 and later that year Ireland on Sunday was relaunched as the Irish Mail on Sunday. Both papers are run by the Daily Mail & General Trust and carry stories from their UK counterparts, though they are often rewritten for the Irish audience.

Meanwhile an expression of sympathy towards Moir has come from the unlikeliest of sources. Despite urging the public to complain to the PCC, Stephen Fry now says he feels sorry for the writer, "because I know just what it is like to make a monumental ass of oneself and how hard it is to find the road back".

Writing on his blog, he predicted that Moir would return. "I dare say she will write the inevitable Vulnerable Frightened Piece in which she tells the world just how tyrannised, terrorised and victimised she felt; piling on the image of the concerned mum (if she is one) who was just trying to ask questions." ·