Circumstances beyond my control which received considerable publicity prevented me from speaking earlier in this debate. However, I am glad to have the opportunity to do so now. Inevitably the debate on this Estimate is overshadowed by recent events. Perhaps this is unfortunate because it causes us to concentrate on one aspect of the Minister's responsibilities, namely, his responsibility for the broadcasting media. Normally this Estimate would be utilised for a wide-ranging discussion of the whole area of the Department of Posts and Telegraphs. Before I turn to the area that, by inclination and experience I am most inclined to comment on, I should like to say a few words about the more mundane but important aspects of the Minister's responsibilities.
Deputies have pointed out already that the telephone service needs considerable improvement. There is a tremendous waiting list in many areas for telephone facilities, particularly in the new building estates. Frequently people have to wait for one or two years before they get a telephone service. I do not think it would require the expenditure of a great deal of money to expedite the provision of these facilities.
In the last few years an issue that has become of considerable importance, particularly for a Deputy who has a constituency such as Dublin North West, has been the provision of communal television services. This has given a wider choice of station to many people with consequent sociological implications to which I shall refer later. However, the provision of communial television services has not been achieved without considerable complaint and dissatisfaction by the people regarding the adequacy of the service. There have been breakdowns and dissatisfaction has been expressed about the rentals charged and about the reception even in the Dublin area. The Minister's Department enjoy a near monopoly in the provision of piped television facilities and the complaints that have been made should be investigated.
The Minister should give serious consideration to the matter of public telephone facilities in Dublin. All Dublin Deputies know it is virtually impossible to find a public telephone in working order in certain areas. Were it not for the fact that public houses provide telephone facilities I do not know what many people would do. The damage to public telephones is largely due to vandalism. I realise this is not the responsibility of the Minister but is something the Minister for Justice has to solve. However, it is a taxing and trying problem for people who live in the constituency I represent who find practically all the coin boxes broken, the telephones out of order and the telephone directories missing or torn. I am not pretending the Minister can solve this problem overnight but anyone who could invent a vandal-proof telephone would be rendering a service to the community comparable to that rendered by a man who could cure the common cold. I do not think this problem should be beyond the ingenuity of the Post Office engineers. Certainly the situation in the area I represent in Cabra and Finglas is extremely unhappy and in cases of emergency this can present striking problems. I would ask the Minister to give it serious consideration.
A few bouquets for the Department and for the Minister are appropriate here. One is the improvement in the radio services which have improved very strikingly. This is a very important and previously neglected area. Radio has traditionally been the poor sister of the communications media. It was assumed that the radio was only listened to by housewives in the morning and by commercial travellers in their cars and it has failed to be funded. My view is that in the last year or two, particularly in the field of current affairs broadcasting, radio has improved quite strikingly. The people responsible are to be congratulated. They have reminded us that what used to be known as steam radio is far from being a dead medium. It is still, for a great number of people, perhaps even the majority, their main access to current affairs broadcasting. The people involved and the Minister and his Department deserve great congratulations here.
They could go still further. The potential use of radio remains, to some extent, still unexplored. I am thinking, for example, of its educational facilities. I know this has been explored, to some extent, but we must not allow ourselves to be hidebound by the thinking of the Thirties and Forties when educational radio was something for children you tucked in between five or six o'clock in the evening. Far from it. The university of the air and concepts like this in countries like Great Britain have shown that radio has a tremendous educational potential. So also, of course, has television. When we bear in mind that still the great majority of our people proceed no further with education than primary level, the potential utility of radio here is tremendously important particularly as we are entering the Common Market the use of radio as a means of broadening knowledge of contemporary European languages should be very much funded, explored and encouraged.
I think radio could fulfil, too, a very important function in the role of citizens' advice bureau. Very often in discussions on television, in the press, at meetings and in this House, the whole question of the role the Dáil Deputy plays in acting as a citizens' adviser is discussed. The question is asked whether a Deputy should do this at all. I am one of those who feel that far too much time is spent by Dáil Deputies in fulfilling essentially non-partisan services of this kind which could be supplied by the State. Recently, for example, if I may single out an individual for praise, and it is rather an invidious thing to do because so many people deserve praise in this area, there has been a service instituted by Tomás Roseingrave in the morning where questions are asked by people in respect of their civic rights on radio. This is a very good development, indeed, and one which could be employed a great deal further. Again, if I may give a piece of praise here, take something like the column in the Evening Press“Ask the Experts”. This is something which fulfils many of the functions which Dáil Deputies and, indeed, parliamentarians in most countries fulfil or attempt to fulfil in their traditional clinics. Here again, radio could play an educative role. If a person has a civic right to something he is entitled to it and he should not have to come cap in hand to me, to a Minister or to any Deputy looking for it. Radio could play an educative role here answering queries and also explaining things like social welfare codes, housing regulations and differential renting systems to people which they do not very often understand at the moment. I should like to see the aperture created by the introduction of Mr. Roseingrave's service extended much more widely to cover the possibility of using radio as a citizens' advice bureau.
Similarly, I should like to see the post offices used in this way. I remember years ago asking the predecessor of the present Minister for Local Government if he would place on display in post offices copies of, for example, the guide to the social services and receiving a rather curt and negative answer. This sort of thing could be done. Post offices are visited very often. They are almost community centres in a sense. They are visited by mothers of large families in the sort of urban constituency which I represent. The Minister has responsibility for these. They could be used as an area for the dissemination of information about civic rights. In the main, through no fault of post office officials or sub-postmasters, post offices are small, overcrowded and rather untidy places. I read in the papers this morning that the sub-postmasters' union had made the point that owing to our concentration, to some extent, on the larger and more contemporary issues, such things as television, we have not brought home sufficiently in this debate the responsibility which the Minister exercises in this regard. In a constituency like mine post office facilities could scarcely in many cases be deemed adequate for the vast increases in population which have taken place. It would require relatively little money and I would like to see it expended to make post offices more appropriate for the community services which they render. With public libraries they are about the only places where people meet and where an opportunity is available for the display of the kind of information of a civic kind which I am talking about.
After those few remarks inevitably I turn to the area which is of greatest interest to all of us and that is the control, unique in many respects, which the Minister exercises in respect of communications. We are in an unusual situation here in that we have only one station. In the days when I was a broadcaster of a semi-professional kind I always used to have to keep reminding myself of this fact when the TAM ratings or the audience response ratings of a particular programme seemed to cause one gratification. One had in those days to remember that the unfortunate viewer had no alternative except to turn the thing off, he could not turn to another channel and so, perhaps, the fact that one had a captive audience for say, a current affairs programme sandwiched between the news and an American gangster thriller did not suggest that the Irish people were as interested in politics as one might have though in the first instance but simply that they had no alternative.
The introduction of a communal piped television will create a very interesting challenge. I wonder if it will adversely effect the viewing statistics of RTE to a major degree. In the constitutency which I represent this is so. If I may be permitted a little bit of frivolity, from the date on which piped television was introduced in Cabra and Finglas, I noticed a marked decline in the attendance at my Monday night clinics. Everybody was so thrilled with the novelty of being able to watch the salacious and pornographic emissions of BCC 2 that they did not come to talk to David Thornley about their blue cards and their housing transfers. This, I admit, is a very frivolous way to take a social survey but I wonder if it points towards a trend.
I asked one of the waitresses in the Dáil Restaurant yesterday if she had piped television and she said she had not but that her daughter had in Cabra. I asked how much BBC they watch and she said they never watch anything else. They never see RTE now. They do not even see the news because there is as much Irish news on the BBC as there is on RTE. This is an apparently frivolous comment, but it is not really. It is a rather frightening comment. When we come back here in five years' time I wonder if we will have serious misgivings about the manner in which people are viewing. This will inevitably involve a change in social attitudes. This is a bit of a hobbyhorse of mine.
I always regret, as a teacher, that the opportunity was never taken to assess the effect of the introduction of television so relatively recently, ten or 11 years ago. We have a pre-television situation and a post-television situation. A lot of empty waffle was talked about its influence on attitudes both political and social and, to some extent, religious. This has a bearing on the coming referendum. Nobody has done a really serious study of the effect of television particularly upon the rural community. This is the kind of thing about which massive tomes have been written in other countries. In its own right it involves an academic discipline—the study of the impact of television on communities. Nothing of a major kind has been done here. This is something which a television service should undertake.
We now have the major sociological challenge of a pre-multichannel situation last year and a post-multi-channel situation in five years' time. In these circumstances, patently, people's attitudes will alter as a result of television. Studies done by people like Plumner in Great Britain suggest that the impact of political television viewing does not tend to change people's attitudes very strikingly. There are famous instances like the Nixon-John F. Kennedy debates about which it was held that a television confrontation charged people's attitudes. Academic studies tend to suggest on the whole that they do not in the political sphere. Patently, in the social sphere they do. Clearly, the days of the closely-knit rural community will no longer continue in the context where BBC 1, BBC 2, Harlech and UTV are easily accessible to the Irish people. It makes a phenomenon like censorship, for example, come seriously under question. How meaningful is a situation where you cannot see a film in a cinema but in five years' time you can see the same film broadcast from a British network?
I am being very careful to avoid value judgments but my own personal view is that this is a good thing. It breaks down social barriers to a great extent and, in those circumstances, the old days when community leadership emanated from certain specific people, the parish priest, the local vet, the bank manager and one or two others, will not continue. People will not accept it any more. They see permissiveness of a kind they have not seen in their community before. They also see wealth of a kind they have not seen before disseminated on packaged television shows. In turn, they become increasingly questioning about their own inherited values, their own familial values, their own traditions, and their own social standards. Inevitably, this is reflected in political and social change. I should like more assessment done on this by the television service.
I do not think you can view something like television simply as a State industry, as a business, as a way of making money, as a simple supply and demand service, to give the people what they want. They want a certain type of programme, and they do not want another and woe betide those, as Anthony Jay argued in The Sunday Times only last Sunday, who for any length of time put out on television something which people do not want to see. A newspaper can commission a series of in-depth articles. It can fit them in between the news items and, in that way, get people to read them. A television service is constricted in a much more direct way by what the people want. It would be unfortunate if, as a result of this, it was dominated simply by the issue of viewing rates and, in particular, the issue of profitability or, perhaps, more correct words to use in this context would be its capacity to pay its way, which is the Irish problem.
I should like the television service to accept that, in addition to hiring producers, directors, interviewers, American and British films and technicians, research is part of its functions. I should also like an increase in library facilities and archival facilities in radio and television. In my period as a television broadcaster the library facilities were only getting off the ground in Montrose. I do not know to what extent they have progressed since then. I think they have progressed markedly. Every attempt of this kind should be encouraged.
It is unnecessary to reiterate the point that television services carry possibly an even greater educational capacity than radio. There is an opening here which can be broadened and extended remarkably. I want to pay tribute to what is, perhaps, the oldest of all educational services on the mass radio, the Thomas Davis lectures, which I particularly associate with the late and very much-loved Frank McManus, who is not given sufficient credit for the role he played in the development of the educational services in Radio Éireann. There is scope here for tremendous development.
I should also like to see the radio and television service being more conscious of the importance of the retention of archival material. We have a unique opportunity at the moment to film history and to store those films. If I may draw from my own recollection, one of my ambitions was to place on televisual record, before they passed on to their reward, the survivors of the revolutionary period. This is something which we did not have time to do in the period when I was working on television. It is an opportunity which should not be lost. Television could play a remarkable role. I wonder if it is a role of which the television service is adequately conscious.
This brings me to consider its whole attitude towards the retention of taped material. Do we know what the policy of RTE is about the evaluation of the importance of tapes and the retention of tapes? As I understand it—and I speak subject to correction here; I am not being dogmatic and if I am wrong I apologise—there is one tape kept in a locked vault in Montrose for the purpose of libel actions in case anything libellous comes up. Apart from that almost everything else is scrubbed, as we used to put it. I wonder if this is really wise. This came into prominence after the death of the late Seán Ó Riada not so long ago when it became clear that most of the tapes of his very remarkable educational musical programmes had been destroyed.
We should bear in mind that we have a tremendous responsibility here. Without going too much into the philosophy of television, it is fair to say that these tapes are to some extent matters for the history books of the future. Even if it does impose enormous charges on space and to some extent on finance we should tend to retain rather than destroyed taped material particularly of an historical interest.
Now I want to say something in general about the philosophy of television, particularly in a monopoly situation, something that has not been much discussed so far in this debate, except by Deputy Burke. I do not want to be critical of my colleagues but, in the main, the debate on the Estimate for the Department of Posts and Telegraphs descends all too rapidly to the level of the criticism of individual programmes; you have a Deputy hopping up and saying: "I do not think they should put out `Hawai Five O' "; "I do not think they should put out more of the `Virginian' "and sitting down again, or praising "The Riordans," or something like that. I do not think this is the function of a deliberative assembly, to act as a kind of choice, sitting here, vetting individual programmes. I do not think that is what we are here for. Indeed, the fact that after Deputy Burke's very good contribution, if I may pay him that compliment while I am on this topic, the level of this debate did descend and that is a reflection on the way in which the House treats this very important Estimate, so much so that one of the evening papers—I think the Evening Herald—had some rather caustic references to make on the debate as a whole and its intellectual level, with particular reference to my good friend, Deputy Flor Crowley, who can always be relied upon for critical contributions.
Now, as I say, it is not a very useful activity to get up here and start talking about specific programmes and so I want at once to declare my interest. I really do not care if people prefer George Peppard to V.J. Thorpe. What I am particularly interested in are the social political influences of television. It is, I think, my function as a Deputy to be interested in these and I make no point of the fact that my former involvement in this sphere may be held to influence my views in this regard. That is our job.
Television is a strange business and I often wonder, listening to debates here, just how well Deputies understand how difficult it is to be a television broadcaster, the difficulties under which they operate, the difficulty of the public, on the one hand, and the Minister on the other. By a coincidence, this has been well brought out in an article, the burden of which I did not totally agree with, but an article to which I have already referred by Anthony Jay in The Sunday Times.
Television people occupy a strange world, a world unknown to the average Deputy here. They tend to be people of considerable talent, attracted by the notoriety which attends television comment, and by, to some extent, the relatively high salaries. They tend to be unusual people. They tend to be younger than average and they tend to have, if anything, a radical bend. This attracts them to the media. If they did not they would not be any good to us. They would not provice the service which was in any way controversial or inquisitorial. The fact that they are this kind of person causes them at once to be laid open to the charge made by Deputy Flor Crowley and others that Montrose is a haven for Left Wing cranks, longhaired intellectuals, Sinn Féiners of both kinds, and supporters of the Labour Party. This is something you get from every Government when in power, a point to which I shall return.
Generally, this article, if I may quote briefly from it said that there was also tremendous pressure to enter television and the high standards of selection brought together extremely intelligent young men and women with lively, independent, trained minds and a highly developed gift with words and with fluency of ideas. The concentration of communication on three buildings around Shepherds Brush was unmatched anywhere in the world. The only parallel would be the scientific complex around Boston. This is a very good and a very valid point and I think it applies with even greater force in a small country like ours with, until very recently, an effective monopoly situation in television broadcasting.
It is a strange life and a heady life. Within six months, through the television communicator, one's name becomes a household word and one's opinions are taken as obiter dicta. This, understandably, annoys Deputy Crowley because these people are taken far more seriously than are the opinions of many Deputies here. Perhaps this is bad. I do not know. But it certainly annoys Deputy Crowley. It certainly annoys certain political commentators in the newspapers. There are about 100 Deputies in this House who could walk down any street in any town in Ireland outside their own constituencies and they would not be recognised, but there are about ten people in RTE who could not walk down a street in the Twenty-six Counties without being asked for their autographs. This is true of any country. I remember seven or eight years ago when the House of Commons debated the introduction of the greater use of the committee system one member made the point that more members of the House of Commons stood in fear of Mr. Robin Day than they did of anyone sitting on the benches opposite. This is very true and it is true of Ireland as well.
It is a strange world, a world which leads to understandable conceits in some cases, to an understandable sense of power. This is its pitfall, I admit; on one side, exceptional brilliance, exceptionable fame, to some extent better salaries than are paid in the newspaper world and, on the other side, a relatively short life. You do not see very many 50-year-old television commentators. Normally, the life expectancy is about five or ten years; you enjoy the fame and the glory and then you drift off. In those years you exercise what seems to some Members of this House —I think they are guilty of a certain degree of jealousy here, as are some members of the Press—to be a disproportionate degree of influence. This is a very sensitive and a very delicate area and it is one which a great many Deputies do not understand. They rush in here to criticise. They are annoyed by one gaffe on television with one interviewer that can do more damage than the good done by a year's clinic work in the constituency and they tend to blame the interviewer. This, carried to excess, leads to the ludicrous attitude of Deputy Crowley. Of course, carried to excess it leads to the equally ludicrous attitude of the Minister for Health with his "good news" view of television.
Sometimes one listens to the Minister for Health asking why is there not more good news, which is equalled only by his homily about tightening our belts and not all together ask for wage and salary increases. I have visions of a television service which opens in the morning with a grinning newscaster saying: "Good morning. The sun is shining" and "I am now going to play you a gramophone record" and then going off again. If that is the kind of television service Deputies want, I personally do not want any part of it and I do not want to be any part of any administration which desires it.
Now, during this short-lived period when people enjoy this influence, they have a particular role in political life, particularly in Ireland, a role in excess of that of any Deputy here and this, in turn, raises the question of the propriety of that role and the extent to which they are competent to assess impartiality in the exercise of that role. There have been some famous interviews done on Radio Telefís Éireann which, it could be argued, exceeded the bounds of impartiality but, for the moment, I want to concentrate on the general philosophical point. This is a problem that arises in all countries. Tension between television and government occurs in every democracy. Take France, for example, and the tensions between De Gaulle and ORPF. How do you solve this problem? Nobody, with the exception of Deputy Burke, went into this with any great character.
On the whole, it tends to be solved in a very hamfisted way by successive Fianna Fáil Ministers for Posts and Telegraphs, reminiscent of the hammer and the nut. Every now and then the broadcaster is jerked to heel and told he must not do this or it is whispered to him that he should not do this or that he should not say this, that he should not interview X person, it would be a bad idea. This sort of concept, this sort of influence, filters down the line. This certainly was true in the period when I worked in television. Nobody ever told you not to do a thing under section 31 (1) of the Broadcasting Act. All they did was by a process of innuendo to imply that if you did such a thing you would be exceeding the bounds of what was good and proper.
But, what are the bounds of what is good and proper? This is something that to my knowledge has never really been discussed in this House. What is the proper relationship between a Minister on the one side and a television service or radio service on the other? Certainly, in the debate on the Broadcasting Act, 1960, it was not discussed adequately and a fresh Act is called for and a fresh opportunity to debate this whole question is called for.
What are the bounds of fair interviewing? What are the bounds of partiality? What is the role of the Minister? This was particularly highlighted in the case of the Tribunal of Inquiry into the "7 Days" programme on moneylending. I want again to choose my words very carefully here. I am not in the least critical of any of the judges who took part in that tribunal of inquiry. I thought the tribunal an unfortunate thing. What Deputies on this side of the House called for was an inquiry into the process of moneylending, not an inquiry into a specific programme. I wonder honestly—again I am choosing my words carefully—just how competent, say, three judges are to assess the partiality or impartiality of a programme; how competent is the Minister to assess it?
I remember writing years ago in an article, "To a politician the only good programme is a programme which he wins". This is true, although I do say it myself. The Minister's idea of a good programme is to walk away from a television studio having wiped the floor with his Fine Gael or Labour adversary, having wiped the floor with John O'Donovan, or Paddy Gallagher or Brian Farrell or myself, as it used to be. That is a good programme. The first thing most Ministers do when they leave the television studio is either to consult their civil servants if they have them with them or to pick up the phone and ring their wives and ask: "How did I do?" and if they are told they won that is a good programme and there is no cause for intervention. If over a period of three months they find they have successively lost and their image is subsequently falling then something is rotten in the State of Denmark and television should be interfered with. This sounds flippant but that is the ministerial attitude in my experience.
With due respect, this is no way to tackle so serious a problem as the question of partiality. This brings me back to the "7 Days" moneylending tribunal. One of the counsel for the prosecution—the State in that instance—asked the then editor of the programme, a man to whom I paid great tribute in this House before, Muiris MacComhghail—in my view the architect of current affairs broadcasting as we know it in this country—to comment on C.P. Scott's famous statement, "Comments are free but fact is sacred". I am quoting from memory but as far as I recall Mr. MacComhghail said: "I never understood that". Frankly, neither have I.
This is one of the areas where we are guilty of a lot of cloudy and confused thinking. Comments are free but fact is sacred. If a man hits another man, that is a fact. If a man throws a stone at a Saracen tank, an armoured car, that is a fact and a picture of that shown repeatedly on one screen is a picture depicting a fact. Does that make that, therefore, a legitimate and unbiassed presentation of an occurrence? Arguably no because suppose that man has lived a life of injustice, poverty, exploitation, depression, unemployment, for 50 years beforehand, surely if impartiality is to be maintained it is the function of your television medium to ask why was the stone thrown in the first place, which means that inevitably it is impossible for this House or impossible for a broadcasting service, particularly in a monopoly situation, to burk the interpretative role. You have to understand the problems of the unemployed, the problems of people who live in a depressed or deprived situation and when you marry this obligation— and it is an obligation which I find acceptable, even though Deputy Crowley does not and many Members of this House do not because they like dirt to be where dirt belongs in political life, under the carpet rather than out of it—when you marry the obligation to exercise this interpretative role with the fact that, as I have said, television people are strange people, in many ways atypical of our society, younger, cleverer, more probing, often with more highly developed social consciences, you are left with a situation where there is not merely a tendency for television to play an inquisitorial role of a social kind but also with the fact that there is to some degree as yet undefined in any country in the western world an obligation to do so, a specific obligation which it would be failing if it did not do so.
This may seem all very woolly but it is very important because—I am treading on very dangerous ground here; I do not want to get anybody's back up inside the television service— with the growing extension of news coverage and a relative declension of analytical current affairs programmes in RTE, one sees that departmental and particularly ministerial thinking, is tending towards viewing television as fulfilling a descriptive rather than an analytical role: the simple presentation of the news, the role of the interviewer as feed, the kind of person who asks the sort of question to which the Minister replies, as he did to me on a celebrated occasion, "I am glad you asked me that", which nearly finished my television career for all time. There is a growing tendency in that direction.
I am seriously worried about the way in which television broadcasting is developing. This is particularly important when you remember the sensitive areas into which television in a monopoly situation inevitably probes and the fact that we are no longer exclusively in a monopoly situation. Many people are receiving BBC transmissions. Anyone who thinks BBC is a model of impartiality needs his head seen to. Having listened to BBC broadcasts and transmissions on Northern Ireland over the past few years I have come to the conclusion that I will never again believe anything the BBC says about Vietnam or America or anywhere else because when they do invade one territory of which I happen to know something their total ignorance of it is so blatant that I wonder seriously about their capacity to interpret events in other spheres.
The same problems exist in the BBC as much as they do here. There are ministerial influences in the BBC, often bickerings between Departments. There are jealousies; there are problems of definition of interest. There are people who are "past it" who are tucked into nice supervisory jobs. The problem exists here as well. I listen to BBC quite a lot. It might be a good educative exercise for Deputies to do so. I also read the English papers quite a lot, another very educative exercise for Deputies.
At the time the Green Paper came out we were all talking about the Irish dimension at the tops of our voices. There were banner headlines in the three Irish papers. I happened to buy the Daily Telegraph and we were relegated to one paragraph in a corner. The headline on the paper was whether Scanlon and Jones would bring the economy to a halt. If we kept this in the background of our minds we might get less euphoric about the interest the British take in our affairs. This is reflected in television and radio. I remember when the appalling incident happened to Mrs. Currie in the North of Ireland. It was blazoned in the headlines here; it was not mentioned in the British news the following morning but on the news programme the morning after there was mention of a statement by the UDF, I think, that the Provisional IRA were probably responsible. This was deemed to be newsworthy. That is hardly a balanced view of broadcasting and the point I wish to make is that this problem is not unique to Ireland.
