I should like to begin by underlining what I believe to be a very important aspect of this Bill: the fundamental philosophy relating to the control of broadcasting which, I believe, to a large extent lies behind it. This philosophy, as I see it, is one based on a belief that broadcasting in a country like ours is most effectively seen as a public service. It should be carried out in an area which is publicly accountable. Behind this philosophy there is also a belief in the value of institutions which act for the public as trustees of the common good in a general supervisory role. In the situation in which we exist the RTE Authority, as constituted by the original Act, is the body charged with the responsibility of carrying out this trusteeship role for the public. This is very important. It is important that this trusteeship role should not be exercised only by the elected political representatives for reasons that the Minister himself has alluded to, in passing, in his speech.
It is equally true and important that this trusteeship arrangement should not be carried out by the people who make, produce and develop the programmes, whether on radio or television, in public service broadcasting. If I can conceive of anything more unpleasant than an RTE Authority composed entirely of politicians it would be an RTE Authority composed entirely of broadcasters. I believe that, as originally instituted under the first Broadcasting Act, this concept of trusteeship of public broadcasting carried out essentially by a body of laymen, of people who even though they may have risen to importance or prominence in some spheres of public life do not have any special knowledge of broadcasting and do not have any special political allegiance, is a valuable and fundamental philosophical point. I find it in the original Act. It was also expressed in some detail in the report of the Review Body on Broadcasting, a report which has often been unjustly —and often justly—maligned. For all its defects that report did underwrite that principle as it was written into the original Act and suggested that it should continue to be a fundamental principle of public service broadcasting here.
I am glad to see that this Bill underwrites again, in a very substantial way, this basic philosophical point. There is another area on which this Bill is a considerable improvement on its predecessor. It marks a substantial advance both in the spirit and in the letter of the original Broadcasting Act. A major fault in the original Broadcasting Act was that while it laid down that the RTE Authority and the broadcasting service generally were to be set up in a certain form, it left the way open for the interpretation that this broadcasting service, although set up by the Oireachtas, was responsible not to the Oireachtas but to Government. This was an erosion of what should be meant by a public service broadcasting idea of responsibility and is an ambiguity which was acted on in the intervening years. The sections in this Bill which write back into law the idea that a body set up by the Oireachtas is fundamentally responsible to the Oireachtas, and not just to part of the Oireachtas the executive is to be welcomed heartily. The way in which this is being done is to guarantee the independence of the authority by making its members, broadly speaking, irremovable except with the consent of the Oireachtas.
There is however one aspect of the Bill which does not go quite far enough and, to a certain extent, compounds one's difficulties in dealing with it. I would prefer to see in the Bill a general proviso or set of provisions saying that members of the Authority shall not be removed from office save by resolution of either or both Houses of the Oireachtas. At present there are two ways of removing the members of the Authority. The Minister may remove them by order or they may be removed as a result of a motion or resolution put down to that effect in both Houses of the Oireachtas.
Without casting any reflections on the present Minister it seems that Minister X, given the choice of two ways of removing a recalcitrant Authority one of which is considerably easier than the other, would be more inclined to choose the easier way rather than the difficult one. This seems to be an additional problem. Under this legislation any dismissal of the Authority can be carried by the Minister or by the two Houses of the Oireachtas together. That is not good enough and I would like to hear the Minister on it later.
The Minister also spoke of his concept of open broadcasting but he did not speak at any great length on it. He may think that the subject has been well enough ventilated in the media and elsewhere but it is something we cannot pass over proportionately in the same way the Minister did. The whole concept of open broadcasting is fundamentally related to the first matter I talked about, the philosophy of public service broadcasting.
It would be accurate to say that we are in something of an interim situation. Who is to say what the situation will be in ten years' time. The eastern conurbations at present have a wide choice of television programming and radio programming to a certain extent. In ten years, with the growth of satellites and the further refinement of the technology of communications, the question may not be of deciding whether Galway, Limerick or Waterford should get this service but of defending our own share of the airwaves so that our domestic station can at least be heard nationally. In the future, and perhaps the not-too-distant future, the question may not be one of deciding whether but one of deciding which.
Now, in this interim situation, we have a responsibility as Members of the Oireachtas and as people involved in the development and, to some extent, the preservation of our own community. I wonder whether the way the Government are presently considering to fulfil this responsibility is the right one. We have limited resources; we have got to decide in this interim situation how best we can spend them and how best we can give concrete expression to the concept of public service broadcasting I have been talking about.
The first thing I should like to say on this is that I do not believe anybody has really spelt out the options clearly. It seems to me, from a cursory reading of the newspapers and listening to the media generally, that there is a widespread misunderstanding about these options, especially in the single channel areas. If you ask somebody from Cork or Waterford or Limerick whether they would like BBC 1 or a second RTE channel they say: "We are not going to be caught like that. We are having exactly what you are having and nothing less". It seems to me that it is our responsibility and the responsibility of the Minister to explain, if it is the case, as I believe it to be, that the options available to the present single channel areas do not include the kind of options that are currently available to us in Dublin. The obvious corollary of that is that, if people living in these areas wish to have available to them the choice at present available to the people living on the eastern seaboard, they ultimately have no choice except to move there themselves; and if they did they might find that the advantages of being in receipt of five television channels might be more than balanced by the disadvantages of moving to the eastern conurbation.
This matter has to be stated fairly clearly. The options for this country, and indeed for many other countries too, seem to be basically in terms of two channels which originated in some sense on the soil of this country and are broadcast nationally within this country, for at least the immediate future. If that is the case the fundamental decision we have to make is not between BBC 1 and UTV but how these two channels can best be organised to fulfil the concept of public service broadcasting about which I have spoken. Let us assume, for the time being, that the cost element of it is irrelevant.
Let us assume that it does not really matter, from the point of view of resources, whether we take one of the options that has been suggested, which is the re-broadcasting of one particular channel from outside, or whether we set up a second station basically under our own control. I should like to examine these options in the reverse order. In other words, I should like to start by assuming that the most appropriate way of meeting this responsibility would be to set up a second national channel and to sketch out some of the consequences I feel would flow from that, consequences the consideration of which I would urge very strongly on the Minister.
The first thing to remember is that a second national channel would not be and could not be a duplication of the first national channel. The first national channel has problems enough as it is, mixing high interest programmes, popular programmes, on the one hand, with low interest programmes and minority group programmes on the other. The creation of a second national channel would, no matter how small the input into it from the local programming service, be an immensely powerful and good weapon in the hands of broadcasters who want to satisfy and please as many of the people as they can for as much of the time as they can. It would increase the options open to them of creating a total broadcasting service in which the two channels would be complementary to each other. It would offer them a great deal of help in putting forward, displaying, talking about and generally spreading the notion of cultural diversity, which in political terms and in our own time, we owe very substantially to the present Minister. It would also improve very substantially our broadcasting relationships and our cultural relationships, if I may say so, with the North of Ireland. The Minister has already indicated his desire to improve relationships with the North of Ireland and to use open broadcasting as he sees it as a major way of carrying this out. I would suggest that a second national channel would be a far more flexible and responsive instrument of promoting this kind of co-operation with the North than the simple re-broadcasting of another channel.
When we look at broadcasting in this island as a whole I think it is fair to argue that it has developed on either side of the Border very often in ways which were opposed to each other. The first broadcasting station on this island was set up in a converted linen warehouse in Belfast and was then and for some considerable time afterwards almost completely under the control of the BBC of the day. Certainly it was a very tame, very quiet sort of station. When I say that broadcasting in this country tended to develop differently and sometimes in opposing ways on either side of the Border I have only to give you the example that for quite a long time the radio broadcasts emanating from the North used to refuse to broadcast the results of GAA matches, while those emanating from the South used to retaliate by refusing to broadcast the results of Association Football matches.
Earlier I criticised the Bill for a provision which I thought it contained, to the effect that there were two ways of removing members of the authority —either by ministerial order or by resolutions passed by both Houses of the Oireachtas. A rapid look at section 2 of the Bill has made it clear to me that this is not the case. In fact, the section relating to removal of members of the authority is probably the most unambiguous part of the Bill or indeed of any Bill that I have seen for a long time. I should like to correct myself on that point before coming back to the open broadcasting matter to which I was addressing myself.
I was pointing out to the Minister how one of the problems in relation to the introduction of his open broadcasting concept, as he envisaged this Bill providing him with a mechanism to do, is that for a long time, at any rate, broadcasting in the two parts of Ireland grew up in contradistinction to each other. I mentioned that in 1935, when there were very serious riots in Belfast, there was considerable outcry among politicians in the North because Radio Éireann at that stage could be heard over a large part of Northern Ireland and was giving very much fuller accounts of those riots than was available to people who were in the radio equivalent of a single channel area at that time. The result of this was ferocious pressure by politicians in Northern Ireland for a complete takeover of the broadcasting service up there by Stormont so that in their eyes, the broadcasting service could be put to its proper use of hurling further insults back across the Border to match those coming up.
I do not see an extension of broadcasting along the lines the Minister has suggested making any really fundamental difference to the cultural questions which he would like to see open broadcasting helping to solve. I am saying this in the context of a strong argument in favour of a second national channel.
Another argument which exists in favour of a second national channel is that there would be, if anything, very much more choice available to people in the country as a whole than there would be with the simple rebroadcasting of a single external channel. RTE already rebroadcasts quite an amount of material culled from other sources. It has to because it has not got the physical programming resources to do anything else. Even if it had, we would welcome the diversity and the leaven that this kind of thing provides. There is very much more broadcasting available to us than we can ever possibly use. Importing one complete channel as an answer to the problem of choice is, I suggest, no answer at all. To give you one very simple statistic, the amount of broadcasting on the commercial television networks in Britain which is available to east coast viewers in this country, because it is being networked by the Independent Television Network in Britain, amounts to 4,000 hours a year. There is at least another 4,000 hours of programming which is produced in the regions by the independent television companies which should be available to us if we want it for rebroadcasting on a second channel. Obviously many of these programmes would be local interest ones and not at all suited to the Irish situation, but many of them are very good. If we set up a second national channel we will have effectively a much more flexible editorial role with regard to the selection of programmes from outside sources such as these. If we take the other alternative we will effectively be abandoning that editorial control almost completely. When I say "control" I do not mean to be restrictive. If control is exercised properly in broadcasting it is a control for something and not a control of something. It is a control exercised in order to provide people with choice and not to deny them the kind of choice that they want.
Let us look for a moment at the second scenario which is the one the Government apparently seem to favour —the idea of a single programme being rebroadcast throughout the country. There are many serious objections to this and not the least of them is exemplified by an anomaly which has had to be taken care of in the Bill. The Bill has had to provide that, in the case of a programme service which is rebroadcast under the power given to the Minister by the Bill, this programme service will not be under any obligation to respect any of the directives which may or may not be given by the Minister or the Government under other sections of the Bill.
In other words, we have got to accept the fact that if we are going to rebroadcast another service in its entirety, effectively there is no control that can be exercised over it. While I have my own views about the nature and type of control which should be exercised over broadcasting, I think it only points to the anomaly of the situation to have one channel which might be broadcasting interviews, or material of one kind or another, which could not legally be broadcast on the national channel. The rebroadcasting of a channel from Northern Ireland, either BBC 1 or UTV, would also inevitably force the present RTE system into a minority position. It is an attractive scenario for some reasons to some people, but ultimately one which will not serve Irish people well.
The problems are enormous and, quite frankly, in spite of the Minister's skill, I doubt his ability to resolve them within the lifetime of the present Government. One of the problems, for example, is the question of rights. I am a members of a trade union, as Senator Mullen knows, and there are very many members of very many trade unions who will not be at all happy at the thoughts of substantial and more or less permanent rebroadcasting of their work to another area without getting very well paid for it. The position is quite simply that the BBC or UTV cannot sell to us what it does not own itself. It does not own the right to rebroadcast material from artists, performers, and so on, beyond the area which it was established to serve. The copyright laws may be shaky and out of date, but there are substantial difficulties in the way of achieving the kind of blanket rights agreement that would be called for by the negotiations of an arrangement of this kind.
One of the obvious other results of this would be a substantial running down, I suspect, in the personnel working in RTE at the moment. Senator Mullen referred to this and I make no apology for referring to it again, not just because one naturally objects to the prospects of people losing jobs, but because we have here in RTE an industry of very skilled and very competent people—an industry which did not exist before 1961, an industry which probably employs the better part of 1,000 people. If we are concerned not just for their jobs and for the money they are bringing into their own homes, but also for the skills they represent and for the potential they represent to other industries like the Irish film industry, we should be very slow to do anything which would tend to undercut their existence or their well-being.
If the situation is such that the second channel is given over exclusively to a broadcasting service which is totally and wholly devised outside the State, the pressures on RTE will be immense. It will be forced, effectively, to adopt one of two options, neither of which is in the least bit attractive. In the first place, it could be forced to compete for the mass audience with the incoming channel and gradually erode whatever minority interest programmes, and similar type programmes, that it may have developed over the years in response to its concept of public service broadcasting. This would mean that the two channels would become more and more similar. It might safeguard employment in RTE to a certain extent, but it would not safeguard the standards which we have come to expect of RTE in broadcasting and to which RTE, with only the occasional exception, has not been too remiss in matching up.
The other alternative is that RTE would give up the fight. It would become, effectively, a provincial local broadcasting station within the general archipelago formed by the British Isles. This is something I do not particularly like, and I do not think anybody else should like. It would be all very nice to have RTE as a sort of cultural preserve, where we would have our Irish programmes, our minority interest programmes, reports of the GAA matches which you could not persuade the BBC to re-broadcast, and things like that; but ultimately it would be a total emasculation of a national broadcasting service to reduce it to this kind of role, with maybe 20 per cent or 25 per cent of the audience, and not even that at times. I see the introduction of a second channel imported wholesale from outside as leading inevitably to either one of those situations, and I cannot see that either of them is something that the Minister should welcome, or that we should welcome.
I said at the beginning of this comparison that I was assuming, for the moment, that the costs were irrelevant, that it did not really matter in cost terms which service we imported or set up. Of course, it does matter. Which will cost more: the Minister's concept or the other concept I have described? I have seen no serious attempt anywhere to cost the alternative and, when we are talking about resources—as Senator FitzGerald said, we must be very conscious all the time that we are talking about resources— we must keep these costs permanently in mind. I can identify at least the elements of costs. My sums may be right or wrong, I do not know. I would be very glad if the Minister would comment on this.
Let us cost, for a moment, the option of importing a single wholesale channel from outside—BBC 1 or UTV. The items of the cost of this service can be broken down roughly into several areas. First of all, there is the capital cost. This, to a certain extent, would be the same as if a second national channel were set up. If a second national channel were set up there would, of course, be more additional capital cost to help to pay for programming facilities. The second element of cost is the rights cost. It is arguable that, in terms of paying for rights and rebroadcasts, the huge complications involved in buying something wholesale from the BBC would not make it an inexpensive matter. I doubt very much that you could get away with anything under a couple of million pounds for the sort of rights we are talking about.
If, on the other hand, we set up a second national channel, there would also be a rights question but it would be a rights question which the present broadcasting service is already coping with. It can arrange at a moment's notice to broadcast simultaneously, or nearly simultaneously, virtually any material which is available to us, and this is a practice which could be followed up without very much difficulty at all if a second national channel were established. We would probably pay less for rights if we had a second national channel if only because we would be using a certain amount of home produced material and this, while costing money on its own account, would reduce the amount of money we would have to pay on rights.
The next element of costs we should pay attention to is advertising revenue. If we import a second channel wholesale, and if this succeeds in attracting a vast number of the audience away from the single national station, it is obvious that advertisement revenue on that national station will fall. I do not know what the figures are, but I suspect that RTE budgeting at the moment is rather like that of Aer Lingus. They have to balance two, relatively speaking, very large sums of money. The tiniest of factors can contribute to making a marginal loss or a marginal profit. In that kind of situation, the less that is done to disturb that particular balance, the better. I can see a substantial fall in advertising revenue as a result of the introduction of a second channel purchased completely from another source. I can see this as causing serious problems for the philosophy under which the station is run.
I should like to turn now to what the Minister said in the Dáil and what he quoted for us again today. He talked about defending the standard of service by RTE as against outside competition. He said:
I believe also in permitting more outside competition. I agree that it increases the financial burden on RTE. I think the State should meet that burden in order to support not merely present standards but an improvement of the standards.
At first sight this is a very admirable statement by the Minister. The idea that RTE should be supported is admirable. But if he is here suggesting that we need to support RTE by way of direct Government subsidy in order to enable it to compete more effectively with outside channels, I must ask him to consider whether he is not importing something very serious into the concept of effectively non-subsidised broadcasting which we have at the moment.
For the past few years, taking one year with another, RTE has managed to exist, broadly speaking, without the Government having to pick up the tab every five minutes. This has been important for its independence. It has been important for the philosophy of broadcasting on which it is based. If we put RTE into a subsidy situation, if we put RTE into a situation in which it has got to go to the Government with its cap in its hand every six months or every year, we are importing a fundamental change into the relationship between Government and broadcasting as it has existed up to now. It may be that this change is thought to be desirable or not to be harmful, but we should not talk about it as if it did not mean anything at all, and as if we did not need to examine it very closely. All these things are extremely important, and I would urge the Minister's attention to them.
There are many ways in which the subsidy concept could be avoided without very much difficulty, not least because the total cost of either service which could easily be in the £5 million bracket, will have very substantial implications for the licence fees from people who have television sets. Here again, I draw a useful comparison about these implications for the benefit of the House. If it is the case that licence fees will have to be increased substantially to pay either for the introduction of a second national television service or for the rebroadcasting of BBC 1 or BBC 2, and if the increase is of the order of £7, £8, £9, £10 per licence, what will be the public reaction to that? I am not saying that one should—no more than the Minister does—justify one's actions solely on the grounds of whether or not the public reaction will be favourable, but this is something which has to be considered.
If the Minister is asking for another £10 on the licence fee to pay for this new channel, it will be greeted very differently in different parts of the country. In the present single channel areas, it may be greeted as being a worthwhile cost. In the present multichannel areas, people will be asked to pay an extra very large sum of money for something which they are receiving free already. I am bringing it to the notice of the Minister that this presents him with some very serious political problems. If we have that type of situation, I can see the already scandalous rate of licence fee evasion increasing even further. I would ask the Minister—I do not think he needs the support of this legislation to do it but, if it needs to be written in, we could do that with a heart and a half—to consider ways of improving the present licence collection system.
At the moment the administrative cost of collecting television licences is inordinately high. I am quite sure the Minister has the exact figures because his Department do the collecting. I would ask him to consider whether or not some more efficient method of collecting the licences could be devised, and whether they could not be a great deal more efficiently collected by RTE. At the moment, anything up to £1 million in the current year is outstanding on unpaid licence fees. This is a scandalous situation and it is doubly scandalous if it is threatening the independence of the public broadcasting service and the independence of the trusteeship arrangement under which it operates. Some time ago a previous Government lost a very valuable opportunity to contribute substantially to the revenues of the national broadcasting service by giving it a monopoly of the cable television system. That opportunity has now been lost, but there is still an opportunity to rectify the present financial situation with regard to licence fees and I would urge the Minister very strongly to take this opportunity.
I seem to have strayed a bit from open broadcasting but, before I move on, I should like to outline what I believe to be a different concept of open broadcasting from that evidenced by the Minister. To my way of thinking, open broadcasting does not mean that areas should be divided up between services or shared between services in the way Africa was divided up at the end of the last century, the way suzerainty was established over one State or another, the way joint dominions have been established in some areas. This is not open broadcasting as I see it. I see open broadcasting as a constant move and pressure to open the air waves and the facilities of broadcasting services everywhere to people who are ready, willing and able to use them constructively and creatively for the people they are serving.
In this country at the moment there is a community of people who have the sort of experience which is necessary. They are probably willing and able to carry out what needs to be done. If we are talking in particular of open broadcasting between this part of Ireland and the North of Ireland, I believe that can be done much more effectively by establishing a relationship based on joint productions, co-productions and common ventures, than with the sort of arrangement envisaged in simply rebroadcasting a second channel. The aim of open broadcasting should be to extend communities of broadcasters and to extend the relationships between broadcasting communities in different countries. Simply to re-broadcast a channel from country A in country B institutionalises the apartheid and sense of competition between the broadcasters of the two communities concerned.
In one of his own statements on open broadcasting in Galway on 28th February the Minister said:
This Government has lifted the restriction on cable television imposed by the Fianna Fáil Government. Unlike some members of Fianna Fáil, including the Deputy Leader, Deputy Joe Brennan, it has no ideological objections to letting the people of the west see British television.
I should like to pull us back beyond that point. We are not talking here about ideological objections. I have no particular knowledge of why Fianna Fáil may have done this, that, or the other thing. The people of the west, and of all parts of Ireland, already see British television in a substantial measure, and they see American television as well. They see all sorts of television. Simply offering them more does not match up to the basic editorial responsibility which fundamentally, in my belief, lies with the RTE Authority. We have to underwrite the Authority's responsibility and power to act in an editorial capacity. I believe it has the willingness and the capacity to do this.
There are people in the present single channel areas who talk rather slightingly of Dublin and, indeed, on this one can readily sympathise with them. They say: "We do not want a censor sitting on the switch in Dublin." I should like to point out to them—and I think someone else should point out to them as well— that if we get a type of open broadcasting based simply on rebroadcasts of UTV or BBC1, their censor will be sitting not in Dublin but in Belfast or even London. If we are to have censors I should prefer them to be local ones.
There is a grace note to this whole discussion which is of course that, if we buy one of these programmes wholesale from the North, we will also be landed with a great deal of material in which proportionately to the amount of air time available to us nationally, we will have no interest at all. Because of the spread of the air waves in Britain, very often they are able to include on programmes like BBC1 and BBC2 minority programmes which would have no interest for us in Ireland at all. I do not want to conjure up a scenario of everyone in Connemara sitting around their sets and trying in a puzzled fashion to work out what Urdu means, or what exactly the Pakistani emigrants in Bradford are trying to say to them, but there is that aspect of it as well. If we buy, we buy everything; and it will be very difficult to justify that, especially when we are forced to take programmes which have no particular relevance to our circumstances at all.
The question of open broadcasting brings to my mind the whole question of culture, something which has already been referred to in speeches, and something which is referred to very substantially in the Bill. First, I should like to pay a tribute to the Minister for the work he has done in helping to awaken many people, especially in this part of the country but also indeed in the other part of the country, to the fact that we do not live in a mono-cultural situation. The Minister has attacked this idea, and the assumptions behind it, with a ferocity which has sometimes been rather startling to watch. He has sometimes got so far ahead of his own troops that, when you catch up with him, you think you find him in the enemy camp. It is only that he has got there before you, but you have that impression at times.
In debates in this House I also have challenged this mono-culturalist set of assumptions, which are all too common down here. I can remember, during a debate on the Higher Education Authority Bill, having a considerable argument with the Senator Ruairí Brugha on the other side as to what precisely constituted Irish culture. Needless to say, my point was not accepted, but it is one which has a lot in common with some of the points the Minister has been making during the past few years.
In the Bill the main section on culture is section 13, which has three subsections. The first is a general rephrasing of cultural aims and objectives and this, to my mind, has been carried out in a way which is totally unexceptionable. It is a considerable improvement on the standard phrasing about culture and community which has found its way into many pieces of legislation in the past. Broadly speaking, I find it a good one. I have some difficulties with the other two subsections of the section. For example, in paragraph (b) the Authority is enjoined in its programming to:
...uphold the democratic values enshrined in the Constitution...
I do not think anybody would disagree with that in one sense. Yet, it does perhaps point up a slight anomaly. What is to happen if somebody decides that the Constitution needs to be revised? Will one be allowed to advocate constitutional revision? If one has different views about the values enshrined in the Constitution and about the degree to which they could be described as democratic or not, will one be estopped by this section from appearing or talking on programmes put out under the aegis of the Authority? It is a legalistic point and I do not want to spend the evening being a barrackroom lawyer. But I must warn the Minister against the insertion into legislation of well-meaning phrases which either mean very little or mean something really inordinately restrictive, especially phrases which contain words which themselves refer to value judgments like "democratic values". There is no more value-laden word than the word "value" itself. While I sympathise with the motivations behind the assumptions in this subsection, they could create a constitutional anomaly in the future.
Under paragraph (c), the Authority is asked in its programming:
...To have regard to the desirability of promoting understanding of the values and traditions of countries other than the State, including in particular the values and traditions of such countries which are members of the European Economic Community.
Fine, but we might not be in the European Economic Community in five years time, and silly enough that section would look then. I speak as somebody who voted in favour of our going into the European Economic Community: I think, on balance, it has been a good thing that we have been in, but it is very unwise to write into Bills like this a statement like this which is dependent on political contingencies no one can really predict. In broad terms, while I am favourable to the first subsection in this section, I find that the other two are gilding the lily a bit. They are not really necessary. They could create problems and ultimately, perhaps they could look ridiculous. I do not think it should be the function of legislation to include sections which would look ridiculous.
On the broader issue of culture, I must confess that I sometimes suspect the Minister of being a culturalist, of believing that culture, as he knows, loves and understands it, is so good that it should be taken by everybody. Part of the problem is that not everybody agrees with this. If I have misinterpreted the Minister, no doubt he will correct me in due course. It seems to me that we must accept that, in laying responsibilities on a broadcasting authority with regard to culture, we are talking about the entirety of culture and not just about high culture. Highly educated people tend to think that high culture is all that matters. Whether it is the Dublin Grand Opera Society, or history, or music of some other kind, they generally feel there is a hierarchy of values in culture with Beethoven at the top and the Beatles at the bottom.
This is a very mistaken assumption because it is basically an elitist assumption. It is an assumption that there is a certain small corps of people in this country, and in every country, who know what is good for themselves and what is good for everybody else and who feel, fundamentally, that they are the sort of people who should be in charge of all the media of communication. It is particularly important that this should not happen in any medium which has a monopoly as indeed, effectively, our broadcasting service has at the moment. I do not think our broadcasting service operates on these kind of assumptions, although I think all broadcasters and all media people are tempted towards them from time to time.
While I am making a general statement on culture, I would make a plea for the recognition of the fact that culture is not a single and indivisible entity, any more than the people of a country constitute a single and indivisible entity. There are all sorts of different cultures. There are pop cultures, youth cultures, high cultures and low cultures and, once we start talking about them and attempting to define them, we will discover that there are more of them than we will ever recognise, more of them than we will ever have the opportunity to fully identify, and that people can belong simultaneously to more than one culture. So, while in political terms I am grateful to the Minister for his resolute defence of cultural pluralism, we should be careful not to take people out of one box, the political one, in order to put them into another box, the cultural one.
I turn now to section 4 and the general philosophy of that section. I have no objection to the institution of some kind of mechanism to deal with the whole question of complaints regarding broadcasters. There are many mechanisms for complaining against politicians but there are very few mechanisms for complaining against people in the media. There should be some such mechanism, however little used it may be, if only to show the people that they have some right of reply, some right of access to the often faceless people in the media and that they have some possibility of retribution if they consider that they have been wronged seriously.
In relation to any complaints mechanism to be set up by statute the first point I would make is that, fundamentally, it should refer only to unsatisfied complaints. This is not written into the Bill but it was mentioned by the Minister in his speech. Perhaps it should be written into the Bill in order to remove any ambiguity; otherwise, there might be a situation in which any complaints commission, however it might be set up, would be snowed under with an immense amount of trivia which would take years to deal with.
As a working journalist and an editor I find that 99 per cent of all complaints are satisfied by the people to whom they are directed first in any communications organisation. The point at which a complaint becomes a libel action, a personal threat or an attempt to have one fired by going to the man upstairs has not arisen in my experience often enough for it to be a real problem. However, it may arise and may be very serious, but it is an expression of the effectiveness of relations between people in the media and those outside that so many other complaints can be satisfied in this way. The number of complaints which RTE are processing by means of the small sub-committee set up by the Minister is very few. The BBC have a system which is not similar to the one suggested in this Bill. There, the members of the complaints commission are appointed by the BBC rather than by the Government. To my knowledge that commission have handled fewer than half a dozen complaints during the past year. When we contrast this with the sort of creature we find in this Bill we find ourselves scratching our brows and wondering what precisely has happened. To deal with a number of complaints which may not run into double figures in any one year we find an immense organisation with people at the top who may be entitled to be paid salaries, who have an immense amount of statutory procedures laid down for them to follow. This raises the possibility of acquiring large numbers of staff to cope with the inquiries. But if the number of inquiries in any one year is few, in what way are these people to be engaged? Often enough there are complaints in the media regarding the number of hours that Senators spend earning their salaries. But I suspect that the situation envisaged by this Bill would put even the Seanad into the shade. This commission will have to invent work, as Deputy FitzGerald said, and we all know how adept organisations are at doing that sort of thing.
I sympathise with some of the thinking behind the detailed provision. For example, it is obvious that the decision to have the members of the commission appointed by the Government has been taken because the Government do not like RTE to be seen as judge and jury of their own case. So far as I know, however, there has been no complaint about the BBC Complaints Commission by reason of their being appointed by the BBC. A very good reason for this is that the people on the commission are highly respected, have proved their independence in other walks of life and could not be accused of being susceptible to pressure.
I can see the proposal to staff this commission from the public service as being an attempt on the part of the Minister and his draftsmen to avoid a situation in which the commission would be prevented from doing their work by being starved of personnel or funds by RTE. But it is an extraordinarily complicated way of dealing with something which, fundamentally, is a very simple problem. What we see in this section of the Bill is an example of elephantiasis—something like dropsy, which starts in a very small way but grows to the point where its resemblance to the original is only coincidental.
Later in the Bill there is provision for the establishment of local broadcasting but there is no provision for anybody to have any redress regarding an unsatisfied complaint with a local broadcasting service. This is an anomaly which should be cleared up. However, I am not so concerned to clear up this anomaly as I am to slim down this gross creature that has been imported into the Bill and which is totally out of proportion to the other provisions of the Bill.
I wish now to make a number of points regarding the content of broadcasting as it is treated in the Bill. The content of broadcasting is something which excites the most controversy. It has been a critical question since broadcasting was invented. There is a story about Mark Twain that on the day on which he was informed that the miracles of electronic science now enabled New York to talk to Seattle, he inquired delicately: "But what will New York say to Seattle?" This very proper focus on the content of broadcasting is something that is with us all the time. We should never become so involved with the technology of the fact that New York can speak to Seattle that we forget completely about what is said.
The Government have a responsibility in terms of the content of a public broadcasting service; but the question is how great is that responsibility and what are the appropriate mechanisms for its expression. I would argue very strongly that the Government's responsibility is minimal and residual, that it is best exercised by the method of dismissing the authority as outlined in the Bill. There are people who disagree with me, even within RTE, and who are willing to accept that the Government should have a power of direction of some kind. I consider that this is unnecessary and that it can lead to abuses. Fundamentally, it could tend to induce in broadcasting and broadcasters a sense of self-censorship of a kind that would promote the wrong sort of reaction to Government statements. It is easy for this to happen. It is easy for broadcasters to get a false view of reality and to start making decisions while people are looking over their shoulders all the time. If someone in the media becomes conscious of someone looking over one's shoulder, one's job becomes much more difficult.
There is a splendid quotation from May's Constitutional History which expresses my own attitude concisely and accurately. This is that “no circumstance has done more for freedom and good government than the unfettered liberty of reporting”. There are risks involved in this unfettered liberty, risks of which broadcasters and journalists are at least as aware as is anybody else. But the risks we run in a situation of unfettered and responsible broadcasting are far fewer than those in a situation in which a Government consider that their responsibility to the community is embodied best in a series of directives or in legislation which would enable them to issue directives.
The problem about directives is that they are always there. Earlier I referred to experiences in Northern Ireland. It is true that in Northern Ireland they have very many similar experiences to those we have had, some of them perhaps in a different league table of ludicrousness. For example, Lord Brookeborough, when Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, once managed to prevent the broadcasting of a programme in which Miss Siobhán McKenna said, in an unguarded moment, that some internees who were being released from the Curragh against the advice of the British Government were "young idealists".
He also ordered and succeeded in getting the cancellation of a programme on rural electrification in the Republic because he felt that people might think it was about Northern Ireland. This is the sort of situation in which broadcasters in the North worked for quite some time and with which broadcasters in the South are familiar also. If I am given the choice of governmental intervention in that fashion, governmental intervention by a telephone call to the head of the division, by the threatening remark, by the innuendo, and government intervention by express direction laid before the House, I have no difficulty in choosing the latter. Basically, I do not like either of them very much and it is only that I like the latter a little better than I like the former.
There is one fundamental aspect of the matter of Government direction which has not yet been adequately dealt with but, perhaps, which I could deal with at this time. It is the concept of disorder as it appears in the Bill. I have two sets of objections to the use of this word in this way. The first is a constitutional one; the second is an argument based on authorities.
I have considerable difficulty in working out precisely what is meant by the word "disorder" in legal terms here. If we are simply saying that the authority should not break the law and that the Government can issue directions to the authority not to break the law, what are we saying that is of any value? It seems that most of the things mentioned in the Bill are matters which are punishable at law. Disorderly conduct is also something which is punishable at law. There is nothing specifically to be gained by telling people not to break the law.
On the other hand, this document with which we are dealing is itself a law. Are we here creating a new crime and are we creating a situation in which the judge of whether a crime has been or will be committed ceases to be the courts and becomes the Minister or the Government? It seems that the major constitutional point here is that only the courts have the authority to decide if a crime has been committed.
With regard to many of the unpleasant things specified in the Bill I think an action could lie against the authority if they were guilty of any of these things under the ordinary law of the land. If they were, they would be guilty of conspiracy to commit disorder and conspiracy to incite people to crime. As far as I know, incitement is still a crime. If the authority could be shown to have committed this crime, they could be arrainged in any court of the land as easily as any other citizen. It seems we have a situation in which not the court but the Minister becomes the judge of whether such a conspiracy exists or could be expected to exist.
I find the pre-emptive aspect of it very strange. If it is possible to say in advance that broadcasting a certain matter, a matter of a certain class, will cause a crime, this is being pre-emptive. It is putting the Government in a judicial role. We must maintain the separation of the Judiciary and the Executive and some of these sections tend to fudge that distinction. Either the section means nothing, apart from what is in the law already, in which case it should not be there, or it means something. If it means something, it could be something which is not very pleasant or something which has rather strange constitutional implications.
The second main reason why I am against this sort of provision in the Bill is that many of the authorities of which I am aware are opposed to it also. I should like to quote, for example, for the benefit of the House a statement made recently by somebody who has made a study of Irish broadcasting. Mr. Anthony Smith, presently a Fellow of St. Anthony's College, Oxford. The reference is to an RTE radio programme in which he was asked by the interviewer, Mr. John Bowman what his veiws were on the incorporation in legislation of a provision about disorder and a provision enabling the Minister or the Government to prohibit the broadcasting of any particular class of action. He said:
..."disorder": that produces very considerable difficulties in the context of the modern kind of news story. In a difficult industrial situation practically any statement made by a senior shop steward, trade union activist, or indeed by someone on the side of management, could be regarded as promoting disorder in certain circumstances. It can happen in any modern society that has either political or industrial or economic conflict of a pretty difficult kind. Most broadcasting constitutions around the world do contain provisions of this kind. It provides a tool for those who wish at some stage or other to curb freedom of discussion through the broadcast media. I think it's dangerous to have it in the Act, though it must be said that most broadcasting constitutions do have a provision of this kind.
Here you have an expert who, because he knows the situation in different countries, is able to say that it is not unique. There is no particularly and splendidly repressive piece in this Bill we are faced with at the moment. But it is not particularly welcome wherever it exists because, as he said, it does provide a mechanism which can be used in ways that it should not be used.
Commenting on the idea that the Government should be able to give the authority certain directions, he said:
Every single broadcasting institution around the world has built into its constitution a provision which enables the Minister or the Government to prohibit the transmission of any particular item or class of items. This has been invoked in the British context very very seldom. In other countries it has become a normal practice. Presumably in the Irish context you have a situation of very very serious political difficulty and it's unlikely that a provision of that kind would not be used by the Government—and there are plenty of precedents for previous Irish governments interfering with content that refers to the IRA. But what has to be borne in mind is that that same provision can be used in industrial contexts. It's very very easy for a difficult strike to lead to violence and for people to accuse the broadcasting authority of having transmitted the statements from either side that have led to disorder. And so it is it seems to me, in the long term, a dangerous provision, although it exists in every broadcasting constitution. What one has to realise with this provision—as I think with others—is that it's always much better to have the absolute bare minimum reserve powers in the actual act which governs a broadcasting institution and to allow any other socially necessary habits of restraint to be built into the professional practice rather than into any code of law.
That, I think, is a reasonably authoritative voice and, as a working journalist, I can certainly underwrite it, especially the last point he makes to the effect that the proper place for this kind of concern is not in an Act but basically in the professional conscience of the people involved. A related authority, less disinterested perhaps than Mr. Smith but still concerned for standards in broadcasting and the media, is the National Union of journalists. In the March issue of The Journalist, which is the organ of the union, there is an editorial article commenting in extended detail on the Bill.
It quotes from the Bill the phrase: "Matter likely to promote or incite to crime, or to lead to disorder."
The editorial then says:
Nobody could reasonably object to the first part of that sentence— but the rest of it strikes right at the heart of day-to-day reporting.
Any reporter or sub-editor knows that stories involving some kind of disorder are a major part of his daily diet. Such stories—involving students, workers, farmers, left or right wing groups, or just plain nonpolitical barneys—make front page news more days than not.
Disorder of a limited and largely conventional kind has become part of the repertoire of the political process. Workers occupy factories threatened with closure, farmers blockade imports of commodities in surplus, students jostle visiting Ministers, housewives sit down on through-roads—all these are doubtless against the law, but they happen every day, and more often than not, the responsible authority thinks it wiser not to prefer charges.
A newspaper, which, as policy, banned all reporting of such happenings, would lose credibility overnight.
But how can you report disorder, and avoid the danger that your report may lead to further disorder?
This is something that was referred to by the Minister in his speech.
How can you ask the housewives why they are blocking the traffic without possibly encouraging other housewives who feel the same way to do likewise? How can you find out whether the occupying workers are militants thirsting for revolution, or ordinary people trying to protect their livelihoods, without running the risk that what they say may encourage more of the same? How can you assess the degree of support and justification for the blockading farmers, without a risk that some people may interpret your assessment as an endorsement?
The answer is, you can't be sure. You may phrase your questions as neutrally as anyone can, you may delete anything directly inflammatory from the replies, you may preface your report with as many ritual disassociations as you like, but if your report is a fair one, and if there is any sort of genuine grievance at the back of the disturbance you're reporting, you certainly can't guarantee that people—even reasonable people—may not be encouraged to lend a hand.
The situation which is outlined in that editorial is a very commonsensical one. In common with myself, the writer of the editorial would like not to see a situation in which, because of the passage of this Bill there are an infinite number of situations in which the authority and people working under their aegis would feel they were in danger of in some way infringing some section of the Bill.
It is a bad principle in law—one which is written into many pieces of our legislation, the Offences Against the State Act being an obvious example—to create a huge host of technical offences in order to be able to trap the ones that really matter. Every piece of legislation should be concerned to minimise the number of technical offences that are brought into being by the creation of any new category of crime and to maintain a decent proportion between the technical offences that are always created by legislation and the actual offences which are those the legislators are really concerned with.
If this Bill goes through in its present form we may risk creating a whole set of situations in which people are unaware of or anxious about the possibility of their being in technical breach of the law. This is a bad situation and it is bad for the kind of flexibility and fluidity that a broadcasting service, above all, needs.
Finally I should like to quote, on the question of disorder as opposed to the question of directions, a statement by the Minister himself. In 1968, the Minister, who was writing about Northern Ireland in the 24th October issue of The Listener, ended his article with a very perceptive quotation. He had been talking about the civil rights struggle in a context in which he compared it to the old Greek tragedy of Antigone, the girl who disobeyed the law because of some higher moral imperative, I quote:
We should be safer without the troublemaker from Thebes. And that which would be lost, if she could be eliminated, is quite intangible: no more, perhaps, than a way of imagining and dramatising man's dignity. It is true that this way may express the essence of what man's dignity actually is. In losing it, man might gain peace at the price of his soul.
Four years later, when he quoted that in his book States of Ireland the Minister said that he was not now so sure that he agreed with the particular position he had taken up. It was honest of him to say publicly that he now had second thoughts about that very powerful and compelling passage. But I would ask him to have third thoughts and to think whether his first thoughts were the better ones because the context in which he wrote his first set of thoughts was something very complicated, very intense. I suspect that he changed his mind largely because of the horrors of the four years which followed the year in which he penned those words.
It is one thing to say that and it is another to argue that the horrors of the four years between 1968 and 1972 were caused by the action of Antigone. One could argue equally strongly that they were not, and that this intangible thing that he was talking about—the protest that in certain points in time goes outside the law— is something that we do not have to support by the law but something which we should be very careful to criticise and to attempt to eradicate in such a blanket fashion.
There is one technical point on the matter of direction which I should also bring to the attention of the House. Under the Bill as it stands the Minister's direction will stand unless it is annulled by resolution passed by both Houses of the Oireachtas within a certain number of sitting days after the direction has been made. If you look at the worst possible situation from the point of view of the broadcasting authority, that the Minister at the end of the last sitting day of the summer session of Dáil Éireann issues a direction with which they disagree, it is possible for that direction to remain unchallenged for anything up to seven months after it has been made. This period is unnecessarily long. The Bill should be amended to ensure that there should be a much shorter minimum period in which any direction given under the Act can be challenged.
