I want to talk in rather general terms about the future role of broadcasting in Ireland. There was a period when I was the consultant on adult education to RTE and for a period of my life I gave very considerable thought to the use of broadcasting in education in general and more especially in adult education, and this is an interest I have maintained in the three years or so since I left broadcasting. It is a matter of very special importance in Ireland in view of the educational structure which obtains in the country.
In order to put things in perspective let us talk about the evolution that is coming in television, though I do not make a very sharp distinction in these matters between sound radio and television. There is an evolution coming unless it is blocked for political reasons —I do not mean internal political reasons—unless it is blocked by international agreements between various Governments. Such an evolution can fairly easily be brought about from the technical point of view, of making television broadcasts available very widely. We have had experience of this when programmes as far away as Mexico could be seen on the television screen. It will certainly come in the very near future so that not only would we have the choice of BBC, ITV and the Irish channels but very many channels world-wide. Unless it is blocked for political reasons it is inevitably coming.
The other thing that is inevitably coming with the availability within the last 12 months of video tape recorders at a cheap price so that they can be owned by schools and even by private individuals, is recorded television programmes in the same range of availability as for sound record programmes over the past ten years. This means that one is now in the process of being freed from being present at the precise moment of transmission of the programme; in other words it will be perfectly possible for schools and for a proportion of wealthier homes—it is much more important in regard to schools—to can programmes of particular interest to be replayed at a more convenient time and indeed to be replayed many times over. The emergence of the video tape recorder, the availability in can, the availability of cassettes and the possibility of recording and re-using programmes people want is a major technical break-through, and so is the availability of programmes from many other countries and many other channels.
These developments present new perspectives for us, and indeed new problems in a country like this, of the sort we have already seen in regard to colour. The UK is in the middle of the colour development that the United States was in a little less than ten years ago. A very rapid take-off into colour is taking place in the UK at the moment. We will follow this inevitably. One important regret is that in a country like this such a large amount of our national resources will be deployed on the purchase of colour receivers. If you cost them at £300 each and multiply them by the number of homes in the country who will buy them it comes out at a very large sum of money. Perhaps I could be accused of being a killjoy on this but I would wish the resources were spent in a more socially productive way. However, as has been seen in the United States and in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, when people make up their minds that they want a colour receiver they are willing to spend a large proportion of their income in the rental of one if they cannot afford to purchase it.
This presents a station like ours catering for a population of less than three million with very severe problems. If you do not offer colour you lose your audience; if you do offer colour you bankrupt yourself because you have only a small number of viewers from whom to obtain revenue. This is a dilemma for a television service and we shall have other such dilemmas in the future as colour programmes from many parts of the world of fairly high quality become available. We have chosen the mechanism of financing our station partly through revenue from the people who receive television programmes and partly through advertising revenue. You cannot retain your advertising revenue if you cannot retain your audience. So long as the Irish broadcasting station depends for a significant part of its revenue on advertising it is committed to a sort of auction of popularity with other channels. Again, at the risk of being labelled a killjoy, it is often an auction as to who can obtain the more degraded sort of film, the type of film that will command a vast audience. We have the rather depressing spectacle that as Independent Television in Britain becomes lower and lower in taste, we must follow them in that downward trend in order to retain the mass viewing audience. The dilemma facing us in this respect is a difficult one for people whose job it is to provide a mix in any television or broadcasting station.
On this occasion, perhaps, I should put it on the record that, from my experience of little more than an hour's broadcasting each week over a period of a couple of years, I did not experience any personal oppression or influence in regard to programme content by reason of a few seconds advertising between programmes. Our system is much better than the American system where chunks of the main part of the time are bought by different commercial sponsors thereby making for much greater leverage. Programme makers do not regard themselves as being oppressed because advertising time is sold during their programmes except in so far as that if one knows that one's tam rating goes down, the commercial time on either side of the slot that one is occupying becomes of less value and one is either pushed out to a much worse time in the spectrum of time taken up by the broadcasting service or else one is forced to trim one's programme in order to keep up the tam rating. Either of these pressures is undesirable. It is only fair to say that our system is vastly better than the system obtaining in some other countries. Our system of a mixture of State money and private advertising revenue for the financing of our service was all right in the beginning but it has these dangerous and indirect long-term influences on programme content and on programme-makers. This is a real dilemma for us in the long-term and it is even a greater dilemma if we enter the Common Market with the prospect of being able to receive programmes by satellite from many parts of the world. We would be able to receive programmes such as some I have seen on American channels, programmes that are so degrading, which are produced for the purpose of brainwashing the population and which could be very harmful socially to our people.
The other point about broadcasting is that as one moves into a period where a great deal of information is received by sound through radio or, by picture, through television, the power of these media will grow to be even greater than it is at present. Then in a country like ours which has only 3,000,000 people and, by the standards of the six countries of the Community and the four applicant countries, the poorest, we would then be faced with the prospect of how to maintain broadcasting that will protect the sort of national identity and culture that will be under threat anyway in the Community. Personally, I consider that we are very fortunate to have this sort of national culture and national atmosphere and we must defend them at all costs.
We must accept that the State will have to make available large amounts of money for broadcasting because of the importance of the media. This is done in the case of the BBC. I would hope that the role of commercial advertising moneys would dwindle and eventually disappear. If we leave ourselves open to commercial pressures we will have the same sort of television as everyone else. We will have the inevitable grinding down of our population by the media to the type of undifferentiated culturalist norm that now obtains all over the USA. If we are to use the media, and particularly television, as a deepener and as a protector of our culture, we will not succeed in doing that on the basis of the present financial system. At the beginning this system did not work too badly when there was not much availability of BBC or ITV but it is a system that will become less effective as time goes on when costs, inevitably, will continue to increase. I hope that the nation will recognise this social charge on public revenue for the sake of worthwhile public, social goals. Television is pulled in two ways. It is used by people to enrich the whole cultural mechanism. It is used also as a purveyor by people who are concerned with making money. Therefore, there is a tug-of-war all the time. At the beginning we compromised and I would not quarrel with the decision made at that time but we will have to decide now, in favour of public support, to operate the system on a much larger scale if we are to have a broadcasting service that will elevate our people rather than one that would degrade them as happens in so far as the vast majority of American television programmes are concerned.
I wish to deal now with the other great problem that faces any broadcasting station. That is the problem of democratic control. Newspapers, by and large, are owned by certain people. We have become accustomed to this in our society. Speaking from these benches, we make a sharp distinction between the way journalists behave and the way newspaper proprietors behave. Generally we reckon that journalists behave honourably and that they tell the story as it is. On the other hand, speaking as socialists, we resent bitterly the political axe-grinding that goes on by newspaper management who are largely motivated by the desire to protect their own incomes. Some democratic societies such as Sweden, for instance, have tried to improve the situation by providing large amounts of public money to the Press so that they would not be dependent on big advertisers or on grinding a commercial axe.
Sometimes one witnesses the sad spectacle of a man who is trying to be an honourable editor but who is being pulled in two ways, the way of truth by those below him in the structure of the paper who are feeding him the truth and efforts being made the other way by people whose motivation is simply the commercial success of their newspaper. In our society we accept this in relation to the newspapers but this is not the place to pursue the matter.
With the advent of television, we are faced with the choice of how this media should be controlled. To some extent, the American solution has been a multiple one with private ownership but it has produced a degradation in the vast majority of American broadcasts. In Britain the problem was solved by setting up a national network, the BBC, and then setting up parallel commercial channels. We solved the problem by having a national network but we sold some commercial time. As television becomes more important, the question of democratic control becomes a very central issue in the whole fabric of our democratic society. The question of real democracy in broadcasting is one of the most important questions that a democratic nation must face because there is the dreadful prospect which we have seen not only in Eastern Europe but much nearer home. We have seen it in France where the national broadcasting service was put totally under the command of the Government. During "the great days"— and I use that phrase in inverted commas—of General de Gaulle, French television was a sorry and pitiful and disgusting spectacle. There were honourable people in that service who either had to get out or lose their honour because they could not broadcast with any freedom.
The situation was not quite as bad as that here at any time, but there was a period in the latter days of my work for RTE—and, in fact, it contributed in part, although not entirely, to my leaving it—when we had a Television Authority consisting of people whose names I will not mention, but they are known. In this country a little less than half of the votes go to the Fianna Fáil Party. We have a distortion of proportional representation which gives that party a slight majority of the seats in this House. That party used their power under the Broadcasting Act to nominate people to the Television Authority so that it was totally unrepresentative of the balance of political, social, and cultural outlook.
Not only did they nominate people of clear political commitment in the vast majority of cases, but they also nominated people who were without stature culturally in broadcasting or in any other way except in their political reliability. A very scandalous and shameful situation obtained in relation to the Broadcasting Authority of RTE a few years ago. It contributed a great deal to the malaise in that organisation and it contributed to the fact that people with some of the finest and most creative minds who ever served Irish broadcasting, and the Irish people through Irish broadcasting, left in disgust. The situation has improved a little but the present structure is open to abuse and, in the recent past, has been very shamefully abused. However, it would be unjust to say that the situation has not improved. It has improved a little since those days. It is a little better now.
The problem of the really democratic control of broadcasting is unsolved. Therefore the problem of creating an atmosphere in which our broadcasters can do really creative and constructive work is also unsolved. This is a very central problem which must be solved because it is not sufficient, in my view, just to nominate certain persons to the Authority. One has to develop mechanisms by which very many of the strands, not just political but also social and cultural, are represented on the authority.
That will be countered by asking would this not mean that every type of pressure group would be poking their fingers into the affairs of the broadcasting station and that work could not go on. I will deal with that in a moment. I recognise that this is a difficulty. I suffered from it when I was trying to make programmes. I know what it is like to have people without knowledge putting on pressure, for the clearest of partisan reasons, about what should go into a programme or be kept out of it. Of course, that inhibits the creative work of people who are trying to broadcast well. People who are very proud of their profession are often very disturbed and very disgusted by the atmosphere in which they are required to work.
We must do two things that seem to be conflicting. As in many other instances, it is a matter of reconciling and balancing conflicts. The authority must reflect the many different strands in the country. I have referred before to Ireland's diversity, cultural, ethnic and linguistic, being its glory. Any effort to simplify us as one cultural, or ethnic, or linguistic strand, is a disgraceful effort which diminishes the nation. We have to generate mechanisms through which the different strands are really represented, not in the person of—I will not use the phrase that sprang to my lips because it is one of contempt and ridicule and I do not think that will advance the situation—individuals of known political reliability. Let us have angry people, and quirky people, and individualistic people, and people with strong points of view, who are their own men, to reflect all those strands in our Television Authority. The present structure of the democratic control of broadcasting is quite inadequate to bear the stresses of the future and to channel the immense power which broadcasting has, and which grows everyday, for creative purposes.
That brings me to the question of the creative freedom of broadcasters. I believe that the Authority should meet rarely and should set the atmosphere. It should have as its prime task the generation of an atmosphere in which the creative worker can work and create freely. The creative worker in television is the producer. The rest of the machinery, be it engineering, advertising or publicity, exists to support and cherish and hold up the producer and make his work more creative. You cannot get creative work from a producer in an atmosphere in which he is continuously under pressure.
I will give an example of the system which I do not advocate in the financial insecurity of our society, but which works very well in the more advanced societies that exist in Scandinavia. There are people in television production in Scandinavia who are on very short contracts indeed. The contracts are renewed as long as the work remains good. While they are on a contract they enjoy the most enormous freedom to act according to the dictates of their own conscience, their own insight, their own knowledge of the world.
There seems to be a conflict between the creative freedom of the producer and the democratic representation of many strands in the Authority. These things can be reconciled and have been reconciled in other places with a higher level of democracy and a higher level of social behaviour. They will never be reconciled until you get people of very high moral stature on to your television authority to generate an atmosphere of moral authority and intellectual stature in your station. Every time you put somebody on your authority because of his political reliability, you degrade the whole apparatus.
Perhaps surprisingly, I want to endorse and perhaps amplify a little a suggestion made by Deputy Crowley. He used the phrase "the university of the air" which is what the British call it. There is a peculiar circumstance in this country which I encountered and tried to do something about. For a period I thought I was doing something about it in agriculture. Because I am more familiar with it I will outline the problem in relation to agriculture.
The vast majority of people now operating farms finished their education at 14. They did not receive any education in rural science because rural science was dropped from the old national school curriculum at the beginning of the 'thirties. They are faced with a highly technological and sophisticated task and they have no training for it. Because of insufficient investment in the past, the education of our people has been defective by the standards of a modern, democratic society. The way to remedy that is by a system of adult education. The way to get at adults is through television. It is not so necessary in places like Scandinavia where the level of education of children and indeed structured adult education is vastly better and richer than it is here. The only way to give the entire population the necessary information for the effective running of society is through broadcasting. We need a vast extension of the use of television in education.
I had the great honour—I reckon it was the most useful thing I have ever done in my life—to participate in the Telefís Éireann farm series of programmes. In this programme we pioneered a technique which was new in the world and that was the use of voluntary viewing groups as the structure of study. Hitherto programmes had been used in schools and universities but they had never been used carrying the whole structure through Macra na Feirme, and all the other groups who co-operated so freely and so magnificently. This programme excited interest all over the world in places as far away as India and the Scandinavian countries. To my great chagrin it was dismantled but it is something which we must do again in many other fields. We have to have this sort of educational effort, not just in agriculture, where the need was particularly obvious and pressing, but in the whole area of enrichment.
We have a great word tradition in this country but we have a deplorable tradition in the visual arts: sculpture, painting, architecture and interior design. To put it at its lowest we cannot compete industrially making products that anybody else would want to buy if we do not have a sense of physical beauty as well as utility. If we do not have that we shall fall by the way industrially. Television can be easily used for this sort of enrichment. There are many brilliant examples of its use all over the world.
We have to have something a great deal simpler than a university of the air which makes people automatically think it is at the level of a university degree. It is not enough to buy Sir Kenneth Clarke's series on Civilisation and transmit that. Unless the sort of education I am talking about is followed up with printed material, with organised viewing groups and with a discussion on programme content it is quite useless. It is a nice little genuflection to culture to buy cultural programmes and transmit them but it is not education through broadcasting. Television is much more powerful as a medium of spreading information, but more important than that, of spreading a psychological attitude which makes people want to know. It is vastly more important for doing that than any other medium at our disposal and we are neglecting it at serious peril.
I do not want to spend much time on this sordid business of the Seven Days Tribunal. I do not want to enter into an auction with the last speaker as to what party has more supporters in the television station. I could tell a tale of people dismissed and replaced on a political basis. I do not propose to do that, because I do not think it is good for the morale of the station at this time. We all know in the broadcasting station who is one party and who is the other party. We all make programmes honourably just the same in which we do not grind our personal political axe. Anybody who knows journalists knows that so-and-so is one party and so-and-so is another. It does not come through in what they produce as copy because they have a sense of the honour of their profession.
I am not surprised that my party should contain people of more creative cultural talent than the Fianna Fáil Party. I am therefore not surprised that our particular political outlook should be more strongly represented in the creative work of this country. I should be amazed if that were not so. That is a totally different thing from sneering at Labour Deputies on the basis that we will stand up for our people because they are our people. If we want to start counting heads in that station we could say who were whose people starting at the authority and going right through. One would then see the placing of people not on the basis of ability, talent, creative work or constructive contribution to broadcasting but on the basis of political reliability. Were it useful to play that game, which it is not, it would demoralise the station and I do not propose to do it. Neither do I propose to listen to the sneers of people who suggest that we have exerted improper influence on any broadcasters.
Let us turn now to this sordid Seven Days Inquiry, very briefly on my part. The full fatuousness of complaining about people being paid for appearing on a television programme is now evident to everybody. The full fatuousness of complaining about participants on a television programme being given drink either before or after is also evident to everybody. The ludicrousness, when one considers the source of some of those complaints, is also obvious to everybody. I need not spend time on that.
What I want to say after the investigation is this: a working Deputy, particularly if he is in a city or near a city constituency, has a vast spectrum of experience about social situations, such as a moneylending situation. In my constituency of North County Dublin there are built-up housing areas. I know from my direct experience many things which I cannot prove, as does every other Deputy, journalist and broadcaster. We cannot prove them. We do not have the right to spray innuendo around us. Neither have we the right to suppress the magnitude of a problem when we feel it is a real problem.
I want to put my opinion on record. When it was asked whether the number of moneylenders operating in the whole of the Dublin area was 500 or less than 50 and when it was insisted by official spokesmen with the whole back up of the police, that it was of the order of 20, this to me was not just wrong but ludicrous. It was directly in conflict with my experience and the experience of many other urban Deputies. The fact that it could not be brought to light with the sort of proof which would stand up in court need surprise no one. As I say, we know many things of which we do not have that sort of proof. In my view the estimate made by a small number of hard-working broadcasters about the scale of the problem was many times more accurate than the estimate made by the Minister with the whole police service to back him up. It is my view, for the record, that "Seven Days" was right and the Minister, Deputy Ó Moráin, was wrong. This is the experience and conviction of many other people apart from myself.
On the matter of whether intimidation takes place—not just a fear of exposure but a fear of being beaten up—that problem existed then and still exists in Dublin. To that extent the programme was right and the denials of such occurrences were wrong. I do not propose to go further at this time except to say that so far as I am concerned that investigation was a sordid affair. It should never have happened because the initial attacks on the programme-makers should not have occurred. When one considers the nature of the inquiry it is a considerable vindication of the programme-makers and more than I thought possible having regard to the type of inquiry and the pressures that were exerted. It was a sordid episode of efforts to put pressure on broadcasters and, from the point of view of those people who perpetrated that effort, it is best forgotten. I would not have introduced this matter had not the previous speaker done so. He may sneer as much as he likes about those people he is attacking but we have a responsibility to do all we can to generate more free comment in this country, not less free comment. All of the key areas of broadcasting, whether the democratic control of broadcasting, the financing, or the use of broadcasting in the area of adult education, are in great need of reform.
I wish to comment on our telephone service. I have had the good and bad fortune to work as a scientist and as a broadcaster and journalist in a number of countries. There are countries where the telephone service is worse than in Ireland. For instance, in my opinion the service is worse in France where it is almost quicker to write a letter than to make a long distance telephone call. However, there are other countries where the service is much better than in Ireland.
We have a small population which is widely dispersed. Where there is a rather poor population a tremendous strain is placed on the fundamental investment that is required to provide the necessary services. This applies equally in regard to transport or in the maintenance of roads. The only way out is to generate a much larger volume of usage and this applies to all kinds of services. If the usage could be increased the inevitable investment could be spread over a wider area. In the case of the telephone service it is the circumstances of the vicious circle. If the service is bad the telephones are not used, if there is an alternative; accordingly, the revenue is not generated to enable an improvement in the service. A rising revenue will give rising investment which leads to an improvement and generates more use. The wheel turns either one way or the other.
As Deputies we must conduct much of our work either by telephone or by letter. I have frequently found that after waiting in vain for 20 minutes for a telephone call I end up by writing a letter. Countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Denmark and Sweden have a much more efficient service. I note that the Confederation of Irish Industry has listed the quality of telephone service as one of the obstructions to a more efficient business situation in this country.
It is possible to generate higher usage of the service in two ways: first, by a better service and, secondly, by a public relations exercise. It is a pity that the United Kingdom had to wait for the hiving off of the Post Office into a private corporation before they started selling communications in an active and progressive way. The structure of the posts and telegraphs system originated a long time ago and it has now become somewhat ossified. Its management mechanisms are old-fashioned and many of its structures are out-of-date. Nobody wants to go into this section and tear the whole structure apart in a ruthless way. On the other hand, to the extent that reform is not carried out in this sphere people will find other mechanisms. This may be one of the lessons of the postal strike in Britain. The mail service there had got inefficient and people found in the course of the postal strike other ways of transacting business and the use of this service will diminish.
We have the same situation in regard to our telephone service. We have all seen the facilities that are available in the United Kingdom. The odd thing is if one goes and badgers the Post Office people here one finds that there are an extraordinary number of facilities available which nobody knows anything about because no effort has been made to explain what kind of facilities are available. There should be a public relations effort to explain to the public the range of facilities available. It would be sad to think that we would have to wait for the dismemberment of the Minister's Department and the taking of the postal services out of his direct area of control before this could happen. I do not think one has to wait for reform until one dismembers long-established and often well-consolidated and efficient organisations. It is not necessary to take them out of Government control before reforms are instituted.
However, there is the problem of a long existing structure becoming ossified but the problem is soluble. The same kind of modern management investigation, business efficiency investigation and public relations exercises which have been instituted in a number of European countries in recent times, and in the United Kingdom, are essential in this area as a matter of urgency.
