I just want to refer very briefly this morning to section 3 (1C) which prohibits the authority from intruding into the privacy of an individual and to welcome this legislative innovation. The development of journalism, particularly in the United Kingdom, since the beginning of this century towards a popular form of journalism has inevitably meant that there has been an increasing encroachment upon the private domain and that the personalities of individuals have become as much a subject matter for journalistic investigation and reportage as events of State and other such things. The line between what is private and what is fair game for public comment has changed significantly in journalistic practice over the last three-quarters of the century, and at the moment it not only varies from country to country but within a single country it varies, of course, from epoch to epoch. Within a country at a given time it varies even between different types of people because some are regarded as public personalities, particularly those in politics, while others are regarded by the journalists as private people to whom quite different standards apply.
It is true to say that, irrespective of the extent to which an individual's private life can be put under public scrutiny, there remains an area which should be secured from the prying eye, unless of course the person under scrutiny is in some way involved in activities which could be associated with crime or with activities which are regarded as being contrary to the public interest. In such cases journalists would argue then that the invasion of privacy is no more than an integral part of the business of general exposure.
In the absence of these considerations there is a point beyond which the invasion of privacy is done solely for the sake of public titillation and the satisfaction of public curiosity. Fortunately this has not been a feature of Irish journalism, although it is, regrettably, very much a feature of British journalism particularly in respect of mass circulation newspapers.
I believe the Minister is correct in putting this impediment in the path of the development of that type of journalism in Irish television and radio broadcasting. The objections of the NUJ on this point are influenced more by the British experience than by the standards which have hitherto obtained in Irish journalism.
Television of course brings its own ethical problem into this area of privacy, because one can literally eavesdrop on an individual without his or her knowledge and can literally record, through a hidden camera or microphone or both, the private words or actions of the unsuspecting. It has been sociologically established that in private we behave in a different mode to that in which we behave in public. It would be grossly unethical to use private behaviour for public amusement, because it would be very likely in certain circumstances to hold up the individual to ridicule and contempt.
This is a problem which is raised in television in a particular way, for example, in the "Candid Camera" type of programme, the fruits of which, I presume, are usually broadcast with the consent of the individual who has behaved in an unsuspecting way before the camera. But the very fact that the permission of the person involved is sought gives, I believe, a quasi-legal copyright to a person's privacy and to a person's private behaviour. I believe it to be correct that it should be respected by journalists and such a provision should be incorporated now in legal form in this Bill and I congratulate the Minister on it.
I should like to make just one central point in respect of section 4— the broadcasting complaints commission—the provisions of which in reality give legal line to the broadcasting complaints commission which was established by the Minister since he took office. I am convinced that the establishment of this commission will provide a safeguard not only for the public, but equally important and in certain circumstances more important, for the authority. It will provide a safeguard against interference which is either frivolous or based on unworthy or in some cases quite suspect motives.
It is inevitable that a medium like television will evoke on occasion very strong reaction from individuals or from groups of individuals who believe they have been unfairly treated by the medium particularly in the area of news and current affairs programmes. It is essential in these circumstances, when such a belief exists, that a legislative mechanism should be established whereby the complaints can be lodged and processed in an orderly and predetermined manner and adjudicated on. We will accept that in the main the complaints lodged against the authority will be of a minor character and that there will be little difficulty in handling them. It may be asked, if that is the case, why the necessity to establish a commission whose composition, functions and role occupy four pages of this Bill? The answer lies in the fact that perhaps once or twice in a decade a major controversy will arise about the use of television. In those circumstances it is far better to have an established body to deal with the problem rather than having recourse and having the issue determined by an ad hoc tribunal such as, for example, handled the “7 Days” programme on money lending.
When one looks back at the impact of that tribunal, it justifies the contention that a body such as the broadcasting complaints commission should exist even in moth balls so that it can be wheeled out ready for use when a major confrontation occurs, particularly when it is between the Government of the day and the RTE Authority. This is the area where the greatest contention will arise in terms of complaint. Even if the mechanism were going to be used only once in a decade, then I believe its inclusion in this Bill would be justified. We should never again tolerate a situation where the Government of the day established a judicial tribunal to investigate and report on the making of a current affairs programme rather than the social evil which that programme sought to analyse.
That tribunal had, in my view, a disastrous effect on current affairs programming in RTE. That tribunal effectively broke up the most expert team of broadcasters and producers in the current affairs area which RTE had assembled and which it has not yet equalled in terms of ability. It created an atmosphere of suspicion, doubt and censorship within RTE from which it has only recently escaped. The very fact that the tribunal took place at all is the strongest argument in favour of the broadcasting complaints commission which the Minister proposes in this section. It will prevent any Government in the future from venting its displeasure on the authority by trundling out the massive apparatus of a judicial tribunal, the very nature of which is intimidating.
I cannot therefore understand the objections of those who believe that the commission to be either unnecessary or cumbersome. I regard it essentially as a protective mechanism for the authority from Government interference on the grounds of investigating alleged impartiality. At the same time it is a mechanism for the individual citizen or for groups of citizens who can employ the commission if there is a belief that injustice has been done by RTE. For these reasons I believe its establishment is a far-reaching and a very wide measure which should have support.
The Minister invited the House to speculate with him on a number of questions which he poses as to the nature of a liberal democratic society and the measures which it should take to protect itself. He anticipated that this might provide the focal point of the debate on this Bill. However, in general it can be stated that we are by nature a non-speculative people and that section 6 of this Bill is going to prove far more seductive than sections 2 or three. It is not surprising, therefore that section 6 has attracted so much attention on the question of rebroadcasting.
This is a question which must be put into a far wider context than simply the question of an Irish Government permitting the rebroadcasting of a British television channel. I want to refer to an article by Richard Dill in the European Broadcasting Review, published in January of this year, which was entitled “Television in the 1980s.” The very title of the article puts this debate in the proper time perspective, since it is the television problems of the late seventies and eighties to which we should be addressing ourselves in this debate. This author makes the following disconcerting point early on in his article. He offers the view, and I quote:
In the course of the next few years the two programming models based on market and planning principles will diverge to an increasing extent. The market model means that the majority decides on the programming policy: programming by constant referendum. The other alternative is the planning model, planning based on the principle of authority, programming devised for the majority by an élite, by a minority.
This is a minority which has been described as "enlightened despotism" by the chairman of the EBU radio programme committee. There has been more than a faint odour of that enlightenment in this Chamber whenever section 6 has been debated. Section 6 deals with the possibility of the rebroadcasting by RTE of a British channel in the immediate future in preference to the establishment of a second RTE channel. Dill, in that article, warns that in the years ahead programme makers will be caught between the claims of the majority and the dictates of minorities—a prophetic warning because the minorities are very active in this de-date.
Senator Robinson epitomised this attitude when she opposed the Governments proposal to provide choice of programmes in the single-channel area by the possibility of rebroadcasting a British channel. She proposed instead the second RTE channel for the entire country which would consist of, as she said, at column 947 of the Seanad Official Report of 19th March, 1975, "the cream of programmes broadcast on other services." The problem is that the people in the single-channel area do not want cream; they want skim milk. I believe they are entitled to what they want, provided it is financially and technically possible to provide the service.
I also feel that part of the reason this argument is being conducted with such ferocity is that the ordinary people in the single-channel area know only too well that the real issue is, whose hand is going to be on the button—theirs or that of some fellow in Dublin who thinks he knows what is best for them. The central issue is one of programme control, as was made evident in an RTE interview last night with the new Director General, Oliver Maloney. The question is: do the people of Cork, Kerry, Galway and Mayo get BBC 1 as broadcast or do they get an edited version of BBC 1, BBC 2, UTV and possibly European stations as decided by some expert on cream in Dublin?
What we have got here is a national version of a controversy that is affecting all advanced countries with developed television services. We should not make the mistake of believing that our problem is so unique that it is without parallel or of thinking it is so commonplace that we have all the answers readymade. I suggest we should put the issue in perspective by recalling the following ten facts:
(1) Irish television was established because the people in the multi-channel area were already watching British television and because a national television service was considered a right as well as a necessity.
(2) After RTE's establishment nobody proposed that British television should be jammed on the grounds that it was culturally damaging or financially ruinous to RTE.
(3) Nobody has yet proposed that the 50 per cent of the population in the multi-channel area should now be denied access to British television.
(4) Nobody has proved that the 50 per cent of the population in the multi-channel area are discernibly more anglicised, Americanised, de-Gaelicised or brainwashed by foreign cultural, commercial or political influence than those in the single-channel area.
(5) In the multi-channel area RTE's share of the audience is just under half. This shows it can compete with the three other channels.
(6) All the evidence suggests that the 50 per cent of the population who live in the single-channel area want the same type of programme choice as is available in the multi-channel area.
(7) The only way at the current stage of television technology in which the single channel area can be given the same type of programme choice with additional channels is by the provision of one new transmitter network per extra channel. If the people in the single-channel area want three extra channels, there will have to be built three additional transmitter networks.
(8) At present money values the cost of an extra transmitter network is £3.7 million. Full programme choice throughout the entire country, would, on present money values, cost £11.1 million and I am basing those figures on the Minister's speech at column 774 of the Seanad Official Report of 12th March.
(9) Cable television is not the answer if the provision of full programme choice throughout the entire country is wanted, as about 40 per cent of the population live outside concentrations of 20 houses or more. Therefore the cost of 100 per cent cable television coverage would be economically prohibitive, the same type of problem as arises, for example, in rural electrification.
(10) One extra transmitter network is currently being built.
Given these facts and I believe all these points to be facts rather than conjecture, the question is what do we want to do with the second transmitter network? Are we to put BBC 1 on it, if available, or RTE 2. I am a firm believer in the proposition that if the people want bread they should not be offered cake. In the area of the country where multi-channel choice is possible the people have demonstrated that they want multi-channel choice. The forest of TV aerials in our towns and in our cities and our countryside is tangible, concrete proof of the people's actual choice, proof which cannot be denied, explained away or criticised as being anti-national, since they are the nation not the self-appointed cliques, enlightened or otherwise. If part of the population living with the possibility of multi-channel choice have turned that possibility into an actuality of their own volition, we could argue a priori that the other half of the population would opt for multi-channel choice if given the same possibility. I do not think that is stretching common sense too far.
On the 27th February of this year Mary Maher wrote in The Irish Times:
It is still not quite clear whether the many groups outside Dublin seeking multi-channel television really want BBC 1 or whether they might actually prefer the alternative proposal, that is, RTE 2, if they had a choice.
She got a reply on the 8th March in a letter from a Mr. M.J.R. Cogan of Glanmire, Co. Cork, who wrote:
As a member of the Cork Multi-Channel Television Campaign Committee for a number of years I can categorically answer for Cork. There are 14 local authorities in Cork. Everyone of these authorities has passed a resolution in favour of multi-channel television, that is they have plainly recorded their views that the people whom they represent should be able to receive the same programmes as those people on our East Coast who can receive BBC 1, BBC 2 and ITV.
Politicians are reasonably accurate barometers of public pressure. If local authorities in the mass in a county like Cork on a non-party issue, as it was previously, give a consistent decision, then I think it can be held with more than normal political certainty that this is what the majority of people on the ground actually want. If one adds to that evidence the discernible pressure exerted on all of us who engaged in the Cork and Galway by-elections, then we can conclude that Mr. Cogan of Glanmire is on fairly firm grounds in his assertion.
Looking at the forest of TV aerials in Dublin and elsewhere, and having experienced the lobbying of the multi-channel campaign committees in the single-channel areas during those by-elections and at other times, I have no difficulty in believing that ordinary people if left alone and if given the opportunity will decide on multi-channel television. I do not believe them wrong in so deciding. I do not believe any Government to be wrong because they decide to help them in obtaining that choice. Therefore charges of national apostasy, of cultural sell-outs and betrayal, if they are going to be made, should be levelled at the viewers and not at the Government, although I understand that the principle that the people have the right to do wrong has long ago been abandoned even by Fianna Fáil. I think it is regrettable that this debate on programme choice in the single-channel area should have led to a manifestation of what can only be described as cultural chauvinism from predictable sources and by some others which were not predictable on previous experience. But I think the Minister will have to live with that and with the wildly exaggerated charges that he is handing over our national airwaves to a foreign power, when all he is doing, like any good democratic politician, is attempting to provide the people with the service they desire.
I said earlier that we should not imagine our situation to be unique or that the problems raised by it are being handled for the first time. Every small country with the same language as a larger neighbour has tended to enjoy its neighbour's television. Normally this is done by cable, but this mainly arises because cable is more suited to private enterprise and very frequently extra legal enterprise at that. The two classic cases where this occurs are in Belgium and Canada. In Belgium, for example, the cable system became so complex that the State had to step in and rationalise the microwavelengths and provide a choice of eight foreign channels.
Belgium is a very densely populated country, unlike Ireland, and cable provides an adequate answer for most of the population. In Canada, where the same density of population exists along the border with the United States—there are of course areas which are sparsely populated, but the highest proportion of the population lives close to the US border—cable television has also provided the answer there. In Canada they decided the correct way to protect their own culture was to prevent the exploitation of the local advertising market by American stations and so they arranged for the substitution of commercials for the benefit of Canadian broadcasting corporations. The recent Federal Court of Appeal decision in the Rogers case showed that the objections of the US TV stations to this process could not be sustained in law.
The same demand for foreign programmes when there is a common language took a slightly different turn in Italy. There the demand first came from the German- and French-speaking border regions. In those areas German and French language channels were rebroadcast by the Italian National Broadcasting Corporation. Subsequently the demand for colour television, which we know occurs here too, led to a major private enterprise rebroadcasting of Italian language broadcasts emanating from both Switzerland and from Yugoslavia. The Italian Government tried to stop this but was restrained by the Supreme Court and the broadcasting decree which has been recently debated in Italy provides for the rebroadcasting of foreign channels with advertisements eliminated.
If one wanted one could offer further examples, but I think they are unnecessary, to establish the fact that poaching of other people's television is commonplace and that institutional problems are raised by governments to the express demand of the people of one country to have access to the television of their neighbour. In Ireland it was a previous Government who permitted the use of cable television to transmit British programmes into Irish homes, if one wants to use emotive language, when in 1967, at the insistence of its then Minister for Local Government, Deputy Neil T. Blaney, it installed cable television in Ballymun. What happened next was predictable. There were extra-legal installations of cable television in other parts of Dublin, exactly the same pattern as in Canada, Belgium and Italy to which I have previously referred.
The Fianna Fáil Government of the day responded, not by outlawing or by banning cable television bringing British programmes into Irish homes and thus exposing the people and RTE to all the dangers of which the Minister is now being warned, but by legalising and controlling cable television and by permitting RTE itself to go into the business of providing cable television. For example RTE Relays have wired my home for cable television. Therefore I receive, through an agency of the State and by deliberate Government decision, British television in my Irish home. The present Government have approached this situation with more openness and candidness than their predecessors. The present Minister has eliminated the ridiculous limit of 500 outlets on the cable system and he has put a levy on private cable revenues in order to compensate RTE for any loss of income that might occur.
The situation has now gone one stage further. It is proposed to provide those outside the area which can be covered by cable with an additional channel currently being received in the multi-channel area. This is an institutional response to an actual situation, not one which is being traded by the Government but one which exists because the people have decided that it exists. At the same time the Minister and the Government have suggested that RTE be offered to the people of Northern Ireland on a reciprocal basis. This is the open broadcasting concept which is simply a variation of the multi-channel problem which exists in other countries. I do not believe it is central to the problem and is not necessary to justify the proposition contained in the Bill.
The introduction of RTE 2, as an alternative to a British channel, is the biggest red herring to swim into the political pool for a long time. It belongs to a totally different area of argument, unless of course one is arguing that the people of Tipperary, Limerick, Cork, Kerry or Galway should have censorship of British programmes while the people in Dublin go uncensored. Some are putting forward that argument although they are not admitting to it publicly.
The RTE 2 proposal is an omnibus title for three different concepts: (1) a channel which complements RTE 1 along the lines of BBC 2's relationship with BBC 1; (2) a channel which compensates for the unavailability of British television in half the country by providing a selection of their programmes and (3) a channel which does neither but which widens programme choice by offering a selection of British, West European, North American and East European programmes.
It is self-evident that RTE 2 cannot be all three things simultaneously. It is either a genuine Irish second channel complementing RTE 1, or a compendium of British programmes compensating for the absence of British programmes in the single channel area, or a magazine of all that is best, the cream of the world's television programmes. But it cannot be all three things simultaneously. In fact, these are not really alternatives, they are contraries.
The compensation model is the most insidious, being the worst form of élitism, whether enlightened or otherwise that one could encounter. The variation model, No. 3, is a luxury in present circumstances. The only model which has any value is model No. 1, which is the genuine complementary channel. The argument against it at the moment must revolve around the fact that there is no popular demand for this channel, that RTE 1 needs the total attention of broadcasters in the medium term and that it would be crippling, financially, at a time when RTE 1 is in financial difficulties anyway.
Much of the confusion regarding the choice of priorities for the immediate future has arisen because some people believe that BBC 1 and RTE 2 are mutually exclusive. As I understand it, they are not. The real decision is which comes first? We have been allotted six frequencies by international agreement. If we put BBC 1 on the second channel we still have four channels remaining on which we could eventually put, if one had the resources to do so, BBC 2, ITV or RTE 2, if we thought that necessary and if we could afford it. Therefore we are being presented with a false dichotomy when one alleges that to opt now for BBC 1 is to remove for all time the possibility of RTE 2. It is simply not so. In any event RTE 1 has sufficient programming problems of its own without foisting on it at this time a second channel.
