asked the Taoiseach if he will consider the commissioning or financing of a documentary film on the Northern situation by RTE, based upon a script and commentary by some neutral figure of international repute, with a view to world distribution.
3.
Ceisteanna—Questions. Oral Answers. - Northern Ireland Situation.
2.
asked the Taoiseach if he will consider the financing of lecture tours in the USA and Canada by internationally known Irish men and women to combat misleading and untrue reports being circulated by British information services.
4.
asked the Taoiseach if he will consider sending a deputation consisting of a representative from each of the political parties to meet political figures of Irish descent in the United States and Irish ethnic groups and organisations with a view to obtaining finance and technical aid aimed at disseminating the truth about recent events in the North.
With your permission, a Cheann Comhairle, I propose to take Questions Nos. 2, 3 and 4 together.
As I indicated in reply to similar questions on the 17th February, I am well aware of the importance of enlightening world opinion in regard to the situation in Northern Ireland. The Government's information services at home and abroad are very active in making the facts known and we are prepared to take all practicable steps to ensure that the world is given a fair picture of the situation. However, I am not at the present time considering measures such as those mentioned in the questions.
Surely the Taoiseach will admit that the world is not getting a fair picture of what is happening in the North at present, that British propaganda throughout America is painting a completely different picture, that Americans are being misled and fooled by British propaganda and that the Government and the Irish people are not getting the truth across to the people of the world? We should like to know what action the Taoiseach intends to take in this matter immediately because what we want is the truth in any case.
From the facts available to me and opinions expressed by people who are in a position to know, people who have visited these countries and people who are resident there, the contrary is the case. I should like to assure the Deputy that in the countries which the Minister for Foreign Affairs visited recently he was given the information that public opinion was very well disposed to us in these countries.
Is the Taoiseach aware of what Ivan Cooper stated recently and of what articles in many of our own newspapers have stated and of what people in America who have communicated with their own relations have indicated? The Taoiseach is misinformed because, according to the information many people have, the British are getting their propaganda across and we, unfortunately, are not.
I did not think we needed any propaganda.
Is it not a fact that one of the difficulties we are facing in international circumstances concerning Northern Ireland is that a recitation of the gross defects in social conditions and in civil rights conditions in the Twenty-Six Counties is the most powerful argument against world opinion advocating a united Ireland?
The Deputy is a powerful protagonist of that kind of argument but it does not do him much good.
Prove to me where I have been wrong and then I shall stop.
The Deputy is always wrong.