I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill, particularly on section 22. I know my good friend and colleague, Deputy Crawford, will forgive me if I say that I profoundly disagree with much of his concluding summary. By way of beginning, as I must use my time economically, I say that I do not subscribe to the view that Commissioner Sutherland ushered in a golden era in Europe or in multilateral trade, for reasons about which I can be specific. I read the Tánaiste's speech and the debate so far. It appears there are a number of assumptions at its base, some of which we will leave aside for an occasion when we have much more time. To put it mildly, it is based on the assumption that perfect competition is attainable and that we have true markets, as it were. It also assumes the benefit of consumers is met almost exclusively by the elimination of inefficiencies in competition and, therefore, everybody will be better off if we proceed along this exceedingly narrow furrow.
Where it fails dramatically and significantly is in connecting the case for a Competition Authority to the wider society. When it comes to section 22 in relation to the media, it is unable to accept that work in a newspaper, radio, television or any other audio-visual or new technological usage is at once a cultural expression and is only partially a commodity. Yet it is precisely because it regards it as a commodity that it excludes the colleague Minister, the Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands, almost completely from the Bill. I might say in relation to that matter which is reserved from the Competition Authority, on which the Minister will give an opinion, that there is not any requirement for consultation that would take account of the cultural significance of media work.
One would imagine Members on the opposite side of the House would be able to remember the centrality of such an argument rather easily. One need only examine the sad, sorry and sordid history of the Irish Press in its last days and the way the livelihood of journalists and people who worked in a paper that had moved out from the spancel of a single vision to being a fine news paper with features was destroyed near the end by a set of management decisions and manipulations in relation to financing. Was it not important that the Irish Press was to be no more? There is more involved than just the movement of the shares and who owned what or whatever. I am in favour of openness, transparency and accountability but I do not want to be told that we are on some automatic curve that will systematically handle questions such as concentration in ownership.
I will make another point as we approach St. Patrick's Day when people will scatter themselves across the diaspora. The backbench group of the Tory party produced a document on cross-ownership and upper limits on ownership. It was explicit in what it wanted. Its members were not raving "pinkos", as the Minister for Finance, Deputy McCreevy, might see it. They were backbench Tories and they said there should be an upper limit on what anyone in one branch of the media should own, and strict limits in relation to cross-ownership. I produced a Bill in that regard in this House. It was voted down.
Is the Minister of State, who is a very affable man when he goes to the WTO talks and events like that, not disturbed that we are now entering a phase where the community of broadcasters in Europe, represented by the European Broadcasting Union, can be bid out of sporting rights by corporations like the Kirsch Corporation which can in turn be taken over by Rupert Murdoch's companies? The net effect of that is that the rights are then put on the market and the person who can pay the most will have exclusive rights to show soccer matches, the World Cup, which was probably the most dramatic bid, the Olympics and so on.
The European Broadcasting Union worked on the basis that citizens in Europe were entitled to watch certain events on the basis that they were European citizens, and the charge made by the European Broadcasting Union was in relation to capacity to pay. That is entirely gone. The EBU is on its last legs, but what is very interesting is that there has not been a jot of evidence in five years that the Minister responsible for competition talks to the Minister with responsibility for culture and broadcasting about these issues.
I was a Minister in this area and I recall the resistance I met from the Department with responsibility for competition, which appeared to be of the view that real men talk about competition and sissies talk about culture, even as it limited the right of readers in Ireland. It did nothing to include plurality in terms of editorial provision in the printing press here, as it does nothing in relation to radio and television. Its world is a "commodified" world, and I repeat my criticism of that great god, Peter Sutherland. His world was one in which commodities would move freely, but people did not move freely. He made his way, by a set of clever choices, through the European Union, the GATT and the World Trade Organisation and via Goldman Sachs, with a view of the world that the only feature it needs to usher in a better world was to remove the State's competition.
The good news coming from Europe was mentioned in the Minister of State's contribution, and is also referred to in the Bill, namely, that Commission Monti, who is responsible for competition, was asked more than once in the European Parliament by people across the board, a majority of European Union parliamentarians, to do something about the concentration of ownership that was emerging in the European Union. I was one of the culture Ministers who attended all the meetings of the Council of culture Ministers. The Commissioner with responsibility for culture was urged by the Ministers to put pressure on Commissioner Monti and on the President of the Commission to implement the European Parliament decision on monopoly of ownership in the media. In the end, Commissioner Monti said these matters are best left to the marketplace. He was supported in that by Jacques Delors.
I will explain what they meant for people who are interested. The right to have editorial diversity in society is a right of communication as a citizen, and a citizen is not simply a consumer. A citizen is in part a consumer, and competition can deal with some things that deal with one's life as a consumer, but one is entitled to read diverse opinions. One is entitled to watch films and not know that 97% of them are made in a tiny place on the planet called Santa Monica. One is entitled to have a variety of radio and television production, yet there is not a single line in the Bill as to how the Government proposes to deal with those features of monopoly that are sourced in satellite technology.
The competition regime is being breached every day by people who operate from a technology that is sourced outside of the jurisdiction. It is interesting to note also how much of this is being suggested as an inevitable and inescapable version of the future, that there is no other way and why would we interfere? It does matter and I will give an example in that regard.
I am one of the people who would have liked to have seen coverage of the conflict in Afghanistan from a fair perspective. I do not want to see narrow, isolated logos on my television set which read, "Fighting Back" or "War on Terror", for months on end, which is a flagrant violation of all good production values in features and in television news. It is rather like the days of the landlord. The landlords in Ireland, particularly when they lived abroad and got on with their notions of gentility and manners, were supposed to be people who could not possibly be involved with oppression of the peasants. The agents could do that.
The suggestion is that we move towards concentrations of ownership in the media. There is such a distinction in the difference between the owner and the senior editorial staff that there is no possibility of interference. I do not accept that. The evidence is there. I could easily provide evi dence of when particular events happen that nothing negative is portrayed while X is in town. That is all I will say on that matter in regard to one of the dominant groups in the Irish news media.
I said all that to bring these matters together to help the Minister of State to give a me reply on this matter. Will he tell me what matters should not be solely ruled by a competition regime, in other words, where there should be a right of entry and a diversity of opinion? Can he tell me how this Bill will enable the senior Minister to consult the Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands on matters of media policy? Can he point to something that will ensure freedom of access to books, periodicals, radio and the media? Does he accept the EU directive? Does he accept the position in which the European Parliament has been ignored systematically by Commissioner Monti who has set his face against destroying State monopolies in the name of creating new totally unaccountable monopolies?
I will give the Minister of State another example. When he raised questions about our film industry on one or two occasions, which were answered adequately and proved to have been entirely legal, he did not raise the question of why it is impossible to purchase a film made and put into circulation commercially in the United States which has been a box office success without buying five others in a basket. It did not seem to concern him that there is no country in the European Union or among any of the six applicant countries where less than 95% of US films are watched?
Does the Minister of State realise that there is a great deal more to being in Ireland than being an Irish consumer? My story about the Irish Press and about the right to diversity in publication, print and broadcasting, the right to tell one's own story, the right to make music are all about being an Irish citizen. Everything that has come from Europe, everything that the former Commissioner Sutherland drove through Europe and everything that came out of the completed market was about being a European consumer. It was not about being a European citizen. People laugh at Eurocrats when they come out with this. Jacques Delors had two attacks of being a European citizen and wrote a few speeches on it. In the founding treaties of the European Union there is no reference to culture. Article 128.4 is the only reference in the Maastricht Treaty which states it should be taken into account. Does it matter then? I believe it does.
Poorer citizens in Europe are entitled to have free to air access to matters that are significantly European irrespective of their right to pay. Is this not then the problem facing the Minister of State? He is talking about legislation for the perfection of markets and is working hard in regard to our hang-ups. When the Minister of State goes to Geneva to the WTO talks, the same thing happens.
I pay credit to the Minister of State, Deputy Kitt, who is interested in the initiatives being taken about the ILO. If he were to go from the ILO to the World Trade Organisation, which is only down the road, he would find there is not much interest regarding labour as a profoundly human activity or regarding the view that child labour is a disgrace, that multinationals who abuse it should be straightened out and action should be taken against them. He would be told that the WTO sees itself as something that regulates markets, apart from American production in relation to steel.
I find one aspect of the Bill rather vague and the Minister of State might be able to clarify it. In relation to some proposed mergers, the authority will offer an opinion and make a recommendation, but in regard to the procedure when the Minister makes an order, with whom does the Minister consult? The Minister, Deputy O'Rourke, and the Tánaiste, Deputy Harney, have occasional differences of nuance, but the assumptions they have seem similar; they would like to give away the power altogether. In other words, one can give a technical body the authority to make a decision on a merger or to an approach towards monopoly. That would enable a Minister to say in this House that a certain matter has nothing to do with him or her.
I wish to finish on a matter that is important to me, the role of the regulator, which is not very advanced in the Bill. David Byrne, now a Commissioner, in a seminal address to the Law Society of University College Dublin some years ago on the role of the regulator in Europe and the United States looked at weak and strong models on the role of the regulator. It led to the fundamental assumption that what the Minister gives away is a policy envelope. The Minister gives a policy envelope to the regulator and the Minister remains accountable for that policy envelope in the same way as the Government and Ministers are responsible for citizens, as they are for the market. What is given to the regulator is a clear set of ministerial and Government decisions and, therefore, that is technical. That can be made open and transparent, but the worst of all worlds in the worst of regulatory regimes is where a Minister seeks the excuse of the existence of the technical authority to avoid political accountability. Unfortunately, that is the dangerous road down which we have been going.
We have not had a debate on competition, the matters that are not matters of competition, the matters of citizenship outside the market, the role of the regulator and particularly how the media and what is done in the media are not reducible to a commodity. It is only a Philistine outfit that would see it like that. It is rather like saying that art and culture matter much less than entertainment. Hucksters in the entertainment industry are the people who will be served by the competition regime. What is involved in relation to citizens living their lives fully requires much more. We should be looking at how the Irish Press came to be wrecked and its background, and we should not repeat the exercise.