What we are saying is that we are against a recruiting platform being provided for the IRA either in RTE or elsewhere. In fact, it is illegal to recruit for the IRA, but, as we know well, they are recruiting and are collecting quite openly throughout the country while the Government look very much the other way except when it happens on RTE. This is what we do not like and we do not like the fact that the Government singled out RTE for the application of the general rule of the law that they possess and that they imposed that law only on RTE.
It is undesirable that there should be special rules for RTE and that the consequences of certain instruments of the law should be applied only to RTE. Is the idea, in part, to cut off from undue public attention what is actually happening in this country? Could this be the beginning of a kind of process which, so far as radio and television are concerned, would prevent the Irish people from knowing the full measure of that is happening?
I do not know what other conclusion one can draw from the fact that recruiting platforms for the IRA are general throughout the country but that RTE are under heavy warnings as to what they should do in respect of this organisation, that is to say, that if such a recruiting meeting were to be held, the Government would do nothing about it but if RTE were to report the meeting, the Government would do something about RTE. Is that acceptable? Special rules for RTE are undesirable and special rules for people are undesirable.
There are now a set of people in this country who are not being charged with any offence but who are being blacklisted within a particular medium by Government decision. They are perfectly free to operate in the country. The Minister for Justice says he does not know them to be IRA men but his colleague in the same Government, the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, refers quite confidently to at least two of them as being members of an illegal organisation. Therefore, part of the Government know of them while another part are not aware of them. What does that mean?
The fact that people who are not charged with any offence can be blacklisted on this particular medium which, to a great extent, is supposed to be independent and autonomous means that other people can be blacklisted also in due course. Why not, since nothing has to be proven against them and all that need be said is that they are prejudicial to the public interest? It is the thin end of the wedge. Methods such as this were applied in the past to French television but such methods have done nothing to increase the repute of either the French television authorities or of the French Government in relation to freedom of the Press, radio and television.
This principle could be extended by gradation to anybody that Fianna Fáil considers to be extreme and eventually that could include everyone not belonging to Fianna Fáil. We are still a long way from that, but it is this that is worrying in relation to the watershed because it seems to me to be downhill once this section of the Act has been applied and once it has been applied in such a generalised and ambiguous way.
The Government have no wish to deal with the illegal organisations concerned, in themselves, but they have a wish to clip the wings of RTE whose handling of social criticism they may find inconvenient and so they bring RTE under closer Government control. It is much easier for them to get tough with RTE than to get tough with the IRA. It is this Government's inclination due, perhaps, to their internal divisions, to choose the easier course. Throughout these difficult years it is with RTE that the Government have shown the greatest tendency to get tough. We saw this in respect of the unfortunate "7 Days" affair and I think many people connected with this medium believe that things are closing in on them, that the days when they had a kind of independence that could be compared with that possessed by, say, the BBC, while not over, are coming to an end.
This kind of censorship is pervasive, is damaging to the medium, is damaging to the viewers who depend on the medium, in particular for its coverage of the news, and it tends to be ineffective in relation to its particular objective. Part of the reason for that is that among people who are handling news and comment there is, because of their profession and character, a tendency to resist censorship and to display independence from it with the result that since these words are extremely impalpable, the calculation of their effect is extremely difficult. As a result of an effort to impose a kind of crude censorship, there may be built up a more diffused kind of influencing the public in favour of these organisations. This can be done, of course, by various forms of hints, including visual hints so that you can have a running down of general standards in RTE by reason of the existence of this kind of censorship combined with relative ineffectiveness for the kind of thing at which it is aimed.
A move of this kind aimed at "members of an illegal organisation" who yet are not charged with any offence creates sympathy for the IRA in that they are considered to be discriminated against in so far as that people who have no evidence against them which they can bring to court, can penalise them without making any charge. Fairminded people resent that kind of situation. Therefore the Government, by administrative action, can find these certain people, including the two people referred to in the preamble to the directive, to be something which it is a criminal offence to be but in respect of which no charge is made. This surely is a most extraordinary use of Governmental power.
Another undesirable aspect of this decision is that it creates a kind of respect for the people concerned, including the two people here envisaged, that these are mysterious, unanswerable people, that if they appear they have such a tremendous impact on the public mind that the Government do not dare to face this. I think that on this, RTE's own handling of the kind of episode which gave rise to this, deserves some criticism. The criticism could point to the right way to deal with this sort of thing.
It so happens that I was on the panel on the 28th September, 1971, at Montrose Studio before which these members of an illegal organisation were interviewed. This was a strange process and I think it was a very faulty process and invited, in a sense, the kind of very drastic and undesirable action which was later taken. The way this was done was that these two people did not, like ordinary mortals, take part on the panel where they would have risked a back answer from other participants on the panel, where they might have been cut down to size, where they would be appearing as ordinary mortals. They did it quite differently. These two appeared as disembodied heads on screens within screens like the armed head that the witches use as a prop in Macbeth for "conning" people. They appeared like this. They made pontificial announcements which nobody had a chance of questioning. The question master set the panel to answer questions which immediately had them arguing among themselves about another aspect of what was coming up. It was all pressed and hasty as far as the panel were concerned. I think these panel discussions are to some extent a waste of time. There are too many people scrabbling around for the topic and not finding it. Separate from the panel you had these two oracular heads who were simply addressing the people, whom nobody was answering, and who had an opportunity of making their essentially recruiting appeal and I think that is what it was. They were drumming things up. I think that undesirable, just as I think it is undesirable to take them off, to say: "We cannot hear you at all. You must get off".
I would suggest in regard to these people who are alleged to be, and alleged by the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs to be, members of an illegal organisation—but against whom his colleague can apparently find no evidence—who are in this peculiar category, flatly described here as members of an illegal organisation without proof or even charge, that as long as they are in that position, as long as the Government have not charged them, let alone convicted them, they must be treated on the same footing as any other citizen.
I say "on the same footing". I do not say "above". I do not think they should get these oracular spots. They should be put in where people can argue with them and where it will be found that their arguments are not so invulnerable. Appearances of that kind, appearances in adversary conditions and conditions where they can be contradicted will not have the effect of turning RTE into a recruiting platform for these organisations and may very well have the opposite result. I would hope that there may be a chance of reconsidering this whole approach. There are signs that the Minister at least disliked having to issue this direction. He said:
I need hardly say that it was with great reluctance that I came to the conclusion that it was necessary in the public interest to invoke that section of the Act.
May we take it that as soon as the present crisis in this island diminishes in intensity—I hope there may be some signs that it may be beginning to diminish in intensity—the Minister will reconsider this directive in the direction, first of all, of narrowing the scope, making it more precise, more clear, but as soon as possible withdrawing it altogether? I would hope that the Minister might meet with the authority and discuss with them how best the danger I referred to earlier on, of RTE being used as a recruiting platform, may be met without limiting the right to free discussion. What I am suggesting is that it can be met precisely by applying the right of free discussion to the hilt, by what has been called "the cleansing power of debate". Let these people be heard but let them be answered, not interviewed by a deferential, perhaps slightly obsequious news reporter who is impressed by these gentlemen and tosses them gentle questions that they can deal with. Let them be put on where they meet people who are thoroughly opposed to their activities and who can and will answer them. That is the answer and I hope very much that the Minister will not dismiss the idea of moving along these lines because if we move in the direction in which this seems to point, in the direction in which I hope the Minister does not want to move, we will be beginning to choke RTE, beginning to turn it into an official mouthpiece as the French radio and television became under the Gaullists. That is decidedly a danger not to be ignored and one against which we have a duty to warn here. I do not think we should be distracted from that duty by the thought that the activities and speeches which the Minister has in view here are thoroughly repugnant to us, as they are. On the contrary, that is an additional reason. When one sees people being gagged one has an additional reason, in conscience, for looking at the question of what the gag means and whether it is worthwhile or a good thing.
There is another aspect connected with this to which I should like to refer and in relation to which I should like to make a suggestion. This is the controversial question of news coverage by RTE especially in relation to the crisis in the North. We all know this problem where the coverage by so very live a medium as television of particular events becomes a part of the event and where many people feel that it makes the process of violence go even faster than it otherwise would. This is a very difficult problem to which I think the right answer is that in near civil war conditions the most dangerous thing is rumour, the most dangerous thing is the multiplication of what is supposed to have happened in the next village, where people full of passion will spread the most alarming rumours and convince themselves hysterically where they saw some very nasty act that what happened was ten or a hundred times more nasty. I have seen the effect of the spread of rumour of that kind in two African civil wars and in India. It certainly is the most destructive thing that can be imagined. It is much more destructive than accurate news coverage even though that may shock and to some extent inflame. It is better than reliance on rumour. I have no doubt about that. At the same time, I think that there is room for criticism in RTE's coverage of that particular news. I am not blaming the individual reporters but it is the case that a reporter in a given situation identifies with a given group and he comes out of it sounding much less like a reporter than like a spokesman for the group, arguing rather than reporting, at least in his tone. At least that has been my impression. But, I do not think that we here should debate RTE news coverage—it would be dangerous that we should do so—in terms of "I liked this; I did not like that. I did not like what he said".
I would think that a kind of advisory committee could be useful here. One hesitates a little bit about suggesting a new advisory committee but I am not suggesting the kind of committee that sits down and after a while issues a ponderous report that nobody reads. I am thinking of something much more live. I am thinking of something like, for example, in the United States, the Associated Press, the wire service. They have a process whereby the editors who take their service constitute themselves into a sort of critics' box and supply a running criticism of the Associated Press coverage of different stories, which is important, of course, to the participating newspapers and very important to the staff of the wire service in question, and provides the flow, incidentally, of very acute, technically well-informed criticism of a news flow which undoubtedly benefits not only the wire service in question and the participating papers but the public generally through keeping up a better, and a better balanced, flow of news. That is, of course, in relation to a wire service, a news agency.
What I am wondering is whether something analogous could not be done—it would be a new departure but we are in a situation where a new departure might be of value—in relation to a news service supplied by a national radio and television, whether, for example, a committee could not be formed, made up of the editors or their deputies, of all the daily newspapers in this island. I say all the daily newspapers in this island deliberately because these would include representatives, for example, of the two northern Unionist daily newspapers, The Belfast Telegraph and Belfast Newsletter. These have occasionally criticised, sometimes in quite a virulent way, the kind of news coverage and comment which RTE is putting out and, of course RTE's services are receivable in parts of the North. There are ambitions to make them more widely heard. If they are to be widely heard it would be very good that we would be in continuous contact with the reactions of the minority community in this island, the majority community in Northern Ireland, the community of one million Ulster Protestants who are also largely, by politics, Unionist. An advisory committee of that kind could be of value discussing coverage of particular stories. It would be a highly well-informed body both North and south. It would be critical but through informed criticism and I think it should be useful to participating newspapers, to RTE and, therefore, through that process to the public generally who are dependent on the flow of news both through RTE and through the newspapers.
I throw out that idea and I would like it to be considered both by the Minister and the authority to see whether some approach of that kind would be to them acceptable if others wish to participate in it, and then for the consideration of the newspapers and media journalists themselves, to see whether an institution of that kind would meet a need, as I believe it would. I am not concerned directly with their professional needs but I am concerned with the public needs which their profession serves and which are of very great importance at the moment.
Perhaps the thing cannot be done in that way. Perhaps there would not be support for such a method of procedure but, if so, on those who rule it out devolves a duty of finding a better way of making informed criticism of news coverage from this source which is without a competitor in this country. That is why I think it is open to this particular scrutiny. This would give RTE in its news coverage a kind of protection from uninformed criticism, which is also important, and it would mean that when this House came to debate these questions it would be in possession of the informed views of people with widely different opinions but high professional competence. I think that approaches of that kind, a greater emphasis on the actual use of debate and on the improvement of criticism of news coverage, and improvement of news coverage through that criticism, would be a better way of dealing with this range of delicate problems than is the imposition of a kind of censorship. The Government seem to have chosen the road of censorship. I hope they are not going to go down it. I hope they will find the courage to turn back from it.
