Dáil Éireann díospóireacht -
Tuesday, 30 Nov 1926

Vol. 17 No. 5

ADJOURNMENT DEBATE—BROADCASTING APPOINTMENT.

Mr. JOHNSON

I wish to draw the attention of the House to a matter which, I think, is worthy of the attention of Deputies, because it seems to have relation to a set Government policy, or at least a policy of the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs. I will leave the Minister to say whether there is any other responsibility besides his own in this matter. There appeared some few weeks ago an advertisement for the post of news assistant to the Dublin Broadcasting Station. The salary, inclusive and non-pensionable, is as follows:—Married man, £5 to £6 a week; unmarried man or woman, £4 to £5 a week. Candidates must be not less than 25 and not more than 50 years of age. Candidates must have a good knowledge of journalistic work, including editing, and experience of reporting is essential. One would, even with no further information than is contained in the advertisement, realise that a candidate who must have a good knowledge of journalistic work, including editing, must be a person of experience and responsibility.

Following up the necessity for editorial experience, the qualifications require that he must have had experience in reporting as well. But when the ap plicants applied for further information they were provided with a list of the proposed duties and conditions of appointment of news assistant in connection with news service for broadcasting. That list is quite a considerable one. But there is one paragraph in it, which is near the end, that I would like to emphasise at the beginning. It is that the appointment will be a part-time one. Now, it is a part-time appointment as news assistant of the broadcasting service at a payment of £4 a week if an unmarried man, who must have had a good knowledge of journalistic work, including editing and experience in reporting. Here is what he has to do in his part time at £4 a week:—

"1. Take record of proceedings in Oireachtas and prepare daily summary." The Dáil and Seanad are meeting together, and this news assistant is to take a record of the proceedings and prepare a daily summary.

"2. Obtain reports from Dublin Police and Fire Brigade Stations and Detective Office of important or sensational happenings." These are to come while he is taking a record of the Dáil proceedings. I suppose he will whisper round to the Deputies, and tell them of the sensational happenings somewhere in the city to divert their attention from the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs when he is making a statement regarding the next Wireless Broadcasting Bill.

"3. He is to obtain particulars of outstanding events from National, Cultural, Musical, and Athletic organisations, e.g., Gaelic League, Feis Ceóil, Royal Irish Academy, Royal Dublin Societies, Chamber of Commerce, Athletic Governing Bodies, etc., etc." A part-time appointment.

"4. To obtain results and short descriptions of hurling, football, cricket, etc., matches in which there is general interest." On Saturday afternoon there may be an Association match in one part of the city and a Rugby match in another part of the city, and on Sunday a hurling match and a Gaelic football championship. He is to obtain results and write short descriptions of these things for the purpose of submitting them to the public through the wireless apparatus.

"5. Obtain results of more important races." There is nothing here about prophecies of the results of future races, but I suppose that will come in his spare time.

"6. Obtain daily produce market reports from creamery managers, association and kindred bodies." And then having got all that from all these bodies he is

"7. To edit and prepare for issue a typed statement of all news obtained from the foregoing sources and incorporate in the report the following particulars which will be supplied by the Department of Posts and Telegraphs:—(a) Quotations of Stocks and Shares from the Dublin Stock Exchange, (b) Market and Agricultural Reports furnished by the Department of Lands and Agriculture, (c) Foreign news, (d) Provincial news." Now this part-time officer is to obtain all these reports of the first six items which I read and then to edit and type and prepare for issue. not only these, but these other particulars which the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs is to obtain by means of some other part-time servant, I suppose. Having accomplished all that in his part-time he is to be subject to the termination of his appointment at one week's notice. The appointment is to be non-pensionable and will be for one year in the first instance, subject then or thereafter to a week's notice on either side.

"The person appointed to the position will be required to furnish a guarantee that there will be no infringement of copyright, and shall provide a bond for £1,000 to be obtained from an approved insurance society or company indemnifying the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs as representative of the State against any action, claims or expenses caused to the Department of Posts and Telegraphs by any infringement or alleged infringement of copyright." Now, on the face of it, to any observer, however casual, it must be evident that that is not a part-time job. It is probably intended that it shall be a job for a man and his wife and his aunts and uncles, particularly the aunts who can ferret round for information. And he is to be paid £4 per week!

Mr. HEFFERNAN

A married man is to get £5.

Mr. JOHNSON

Well, I must admit that there is a lapse there. If he has a wife who is to assist him in this part-time job he will get £5 a week. To judge by the tendency expressed in this advertisement, the object is to get the cheapest type, the poorest quality of State servant you can get. Nominally he is to have these duties and serve the interests of broadcasting, but he is to be the cheapest and the shoddiest type of man or woman that could be got, because nobody of quality or experience would pretend to do this work at the salary, and it can only be pretence. These things cannot be done by any individual person in this country. But consider what other aspects there are of this rather flagrant attempt at taking in the public, because that is what it means. You cannot get reliable information of this kind. You will get tittle-tattle, imaginative stories perhaps of a man sitting in his back-room, but you will not get information that is worth putting through the wireless for the public to listen to. The job, therefore, is not a part-time job. It is going to mean that this particular appointment will be the subject of complaint in the Dáil at some future time from the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs similar to the complaint in regard to the Assistant Director, or Announcer, I think, who nominally was a part-time servant but who was found to be working twelve, thirteen and fourteen hours a day.

Now, this part-time servant, to whom £4 a week is to be paid if he is unmarried, is to have the particular experience I have set out. The job is the job of an experienced newspaperman who has knowledge of editing, a knowledge of the gathering of news, together with knowledge of precis writing and typewriting. Such a person in the employment of a newspaper would be paid probably double the salary, and the effect of this proposition is to do what has been done in other Departments of the public service, generally to depreciate the rates of pay—in this case for what has been called the black-coated proletariat as distinguished from the manual labourer.

Not only is the salary miserably low for such a responsibility, but the terms of the appointment are unheard of in the modern newspaper world. The appointment will terminate with a week's notice on either side. The custom in the Dublin newspaper world, I understand, is a month's notice for reporters, three months for sub-editors, six months for leader writers, and twelve months for editors. So you are going to take a man with that kind of status in the newspaper world, a man who has experience of editing and news gathering, and bring him to a scale three stages lower than that of a junior reporter.

Then, to crown all, this person is required to guarantee the Minister in a thousand pound bond against any loss he may suffer in respect to claims or expenses caused to the Department by infringement of copyright. Such a proposition is unknown in the newspaper world. The Minister wants to set a new headline to newspaper proprietors, to impose new and difficult conditions upon newspaper men generally, to throw the onus entirely upon the servant—and the junior servant, the lower paid servant, at that—and not accept it himself. But what is the meaning of it? One would have imagined that if there had not been such a proposition as this the news assistant would be able to gather his news or, shall I say, steal his news, from the newspaper office. But to guard against such a horrible thought that any person would use for one news agency material gathered by persons in the pay of another news agency—to prevent the possibility of that idea even being considered for a moment— this proposition regarding protection against infringement of copyright is imposed. The news assistant must gather all this information himself. He must be in all these places at the same time for fear he may be tempted to infringe a copyright.

I really cannot understand the mentality of the Minister who proposes that a part-time news assistant should be required to fulfil such duties as are outlined in this statement. The effect of the general proposition is to invite the least competent and the most hard-up newspaper man with editorial experience to take on this particular job. He is going to pretend to the world that he is only a part-time man, but it really means that he is more than a full-time man and he is there at part-time pay.

I do not know whether that is the kind of thing that a State should be content with, or that it is a procedure we should be satisfied to allow to pass without challenge. Surely we are not out to make the pace for the blackleg employer generally to reduce the standards of professional men? After all, a junior reporter is one thing; he has difficult tasks to undertake, responsible and adventurous jobs to tackle; but this is not a junior reporter; this is a man with editorial experience as well as experience of reporting work, and he must be capable of doing all these things for the listening-in public.

It is an impossible proposition, and the only assumption I can draw is that it is intended to set a headline for the reduction of wages and salaries for that particular class of the community following upon the practice of the Government in respect to other classes of the community. We have seen, although it is not directly appropriate to this particular subject, advertisements for professional men of various types at salaries very much below what would be required to get qualified persons. That will probably be a subject for discussion on another occasion.

I am going to content myself with saying that this particular advertisement, with the terms of appointment that are advertised, is entirely unworthy of any State service, and particularly one which is the subject of so much—I was going to say boastful— talk from the Minister this afternoon as to its quality, its value, and the kind of service it is rendering.

I am not going to pass any remarks about the quality of the service, or the entertainment in the past. I think there must, inevitably, be considerable entertainment derived from the kind of news that will be supplied through the agency if this advertisement is implemented, to use a word that is very common on the other side of the House. I would be very interested to hear what kind of excuse or justification the Minister has for this attempt generally to degrade the newspaper service.

Mr. NORTON

After hearing the list of duties enumerated by Deputy Johnson which the news editor is to perform, I think the House will unanimously come to one conclusion, and that is, that the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs is at least a good judge of value. I suggest to the Minister for Finance that if he ever requires an assistant or deputy he can commit his office to the care of the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs. I am sure that that Minister will worthily maintain all the high traditions for tightness in regard to money matters and general cheese-paring which the Minister for Finance has established. In fact, the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs might well satisfy the demand of the Farmers' Party relative to the setting up of a Geddes' Committee. If one is to take the list of duties and the wages set out as a criterion, the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs is, in himself, a Geddes' Committee. In future, instead of having a Geddes' Committee appointed, the Farmers' Party should ask that the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs be requested to do all the pruning which they think necessary in Government Departments.

The most amazing part of this advertisement is the miserably low wage which the Minister proposes to pay for the responsible work expected. We are told in the advertisement that the person should have a good knowledge of reporting, a good knowledge of journalistic work, as well as a knowledge of editing, and, in addition to that, he is expected to have the added qualification of a knowledge of Irish.

I ask the Minister whether he considers that he can get a person who has a good knowledge of journalistic work, including editing and reporting, for a wage of £4 per week? If the Minister thinks that, I am strongly of the opinion that he is under a serious delusion, because the men or women who would apply for the post at the wage offered are not the best men and women in the journalistic profession. If they are not the best men and women in the profession, then the type of people who are going to apply for the position at the wage offered are people who will not give satisfaction, and, as Deputy Johnson said, they, generally speaking, will be people who are hard-up and prepared to take the job on that account, even at the wage advertised. But I put it to the Minister that the duties enumerated here cannot by any stretch of the imagination be regarded as the work of a part-time officer. I venture to say that the Minister must be well aware that this class of work, this trekking round from one place to another, coming to the Dáil and trekking from one House to the other looking for information, going back and summarising the whole thing and producing a news bulletin, is work that could not be done in three-and-a-half or four hours per day. If it takes more than that, then it is more than a part-time job. I am sure that the Minister, even though he may want good value, recognises that this is asking something more than good value. To ask a person to perform those duties in a part-time post, in my opinion, is asking the impossible.

The low wage mentioned in this case is not the only instance of an apparent intention on the part of, perhaps in this case, the Minister for Finance, to pay a low rate of wages not merely to manual workers but to clerical, administrative and professional workers as well. We saw an advertisement recently for a Treasury Solicitor at a rate of wages, perhaps politely called salary, that many skilled workers in industry are getting. We have the posts of engineers advertised at very low salaries, and we have medical officers advertised for at very low salaries. Taking this advertisement for a news editor or assistant in conjunction with the other instances of low salaries offered, the policy of the Government is not merely to include manual workers in their attack but to extend the attack to clerical, administrative and professional workers as well. As Deputy Johnson has said, this advertisement has simply set the pace between the Government and the most rapacious private employer. Dublin newspapers are not by any means philanthropic or generous institutions, and if they value the services of a journalist at as much as twice what the Minister now proposes to give, it is only because they realise that the man is value for the money. It is an extraordinary thing that the Government should come along and suggest that the man to whom the newspaper office gives £8, £9 or £10 a week is only value to the Government for £4.

Then, on top of having to perform all the duties enumerated by Deputy Johnson in a part-time appointment, the person appointed is also obliged to enter into a bond to indemnify the Minister to the extent of £1,000 if he infringe any copyright. In other words, he is obliged to indemnify the Minister to an amount equal to five years' wages. I suggest to the Minister that on reconsideration he should recognise that it is impossible to perform the duties outlined in a part-time post, and that it should be regarded as a full-time position—that is, if the person appointed is to perform those duties—and that being a full-time post the Minister should pay a rate of wages at least not less than that paid by newspapers in Dublin and throughout the country.

Dr. HENNESSY

I wish to associate myself with the protest from the Labour benches with regard to the inadequacy of the salary offered for this position. I doubt if the inadequacy of the salary is due to the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs.

MINISTER for POSTS and TELEGRAPHS (Mr. Walsh)

It is absolutely.

Dr. HENNESSY

That is something refreshing to hear. Even if it is, I believe that the salary is inadequate and that the duties that the person appointed will have to perform, though they may be called part-time, will in effect be whole-time. We know that description of a part-time officer, and from experience we have knowledge of persons supposed to be performing the duties of part-time officers having to work eight and ten hours per day. My idea is that the Department of Finance has some special grudge against technically trained people and professional people of all classes when it comes to fixing their salaries. We have had a case recently of a bacteriologist to be appointed under the Dairy Produce Act. This appointment has been held up for two years, and it was all, I have no doubt, due to the parsimony of some official in the Department of Finance. I know I may not be strictly in order in referring to this, but I refer to it solely for the reason that I believe this is becoming a national danger— the interference of this official in the Department of Finance. In the old days we heard of the British Treasury, and the Governor-General, in his Parliamentary days, described the Treasury as a department without a body to be kicked or a soul to be damned. I fear that the Department of Finance is going pretty much on the same lines.

AN CEANN COMHAIRLE

The Minister for Finance is quite substantial and has an existence and, we hope, a soul.

Dr. HENNESSY

I would not kick or damn the Minister for Finance. But I believe that the salaries that are given in those cases will very seriously affect the discharge of duties in several departments that are essential to the wellbeing of this country.

Mr. WALSH

Deputy Johnson is to be congratulated on the ability with which he black paints his pictures. He certainly has not failed to make the utmost use of his capacity in this particular situation. One would imagine we had in mind the roping in of some defenceless citizen, some poor reporter out of work and hard hit, to drag the last ounce of life and energy out of him in the interest of the State and that we are, in fact, requiring him to do the job of a superman for a menial wage. We have no such intention. On the contrary, we are proceeding on the assumption that broadcasting will develop a line of Press dissemination very much wider than we find at present. Already a Press bulletin is being issued nightly. It includes news from half a dozen foreign capitals and sometimes local doings, and certain local markets. That bulletin occupies seven or eight minutes of our time. It is the intention to extend that margin to perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes later on, and this accounts for the introduction of a reporter. This reporter will be supplementary to the machinery as now utilised for ithe collection and collation of news.

Now one would imagine we had made up our minds to procure a reporter under the definite heading of part-time and, then, to proceed to exact full-time duty from him. We have no such intention. Before we walk we have got to creep, and in employing a reporter on a part-time job we are embarking on the creeping stage. If we find, after a little experience, that it will be necessary, then we shall walk. In other words, if the responsibilities falling upon this employee of ours are such as to warrant full-time employment I can say here now, we shall have no hesitation in making that employment full-time and, of course, extending the salary. I wish that to be made very clear. When we speak of part-time we mean part-time.

Mr. JOHNSON

Will the Minister say if he disavows the statement of the proposed duties and conditions of the appointment?

Mr. WALSH

That is the possible field. We do not suggest for one moment that the reporter should cover that entire field. We say: "There is the field that you may cover. You can cover one-tenth, or one-fifth, or one-third."

Mr. JOHNSON

The advertisement says application must be made on the prescribed form, copies of which can be obtained with full particulars. These are the terms of the duties and conditions of appointment. Does the Minister disavow this as a statement of what the proposed appointee will have to do?

Mr. WALSH

I again say this is only the field that the reporter may cover. If it is found that he cannot cover as much of that field as we require then the first stage in development will be the extension of his part-time to full-time and, if need be, a further part-time man or full-time man until the whole field is covered.

Mr. JOHNSON

Will the Minister go further and say what part of the man's time is required as part-time for £4 per week.

Mr. WALSH

In the service part-time is something on an average of four hours per day. In my own service we have part-timers who do two hours per day, those who do four hours and, still, others who do six hours.

Mr. JOHNSON

Can we take it that the person appointed at £4 or £5 a week, as the case may be, is only required to give four hours' service?

Mr. WALSH

Roughly four hours' service. If I find that the service required is anything in the nature of six hours I will feel it incumbent upon me to propose that full duty be accorded. The question of pay appears to be the principal one here to be dealt with. I wonder if the Deputy is aware that reporters on provincial newspapers receive from £3 to £4 per week and that, in addition to the function of reporting, these reporters have also got to act as sub-editors, and sometimes in the capacity of editors, and all this at a salary of £3 to £4 a week. We are also aware that on some of the weekly papers here reporters are not better off in that respect, nor are their duties within narrower limitations. On the other hand we find that reporters on the Dublin papers receive from £5 to £7 a week for full duties, and that, as far as we can ascertain, only one reporter is paid £8 a week.

Now let us see what we propose to offer here. For an unmarried man or woman the salary will be for part-time £4 to £5 a week. For a married man £5 to £6 a week; that is for part-time. Let us assume that we get a married man; his salary will be for part-time £5 to £6 a week as against a salary of £5 to £7 a week for full-time men on the Dublin newspapers. That surely is not a slave wage. It has all the appearance of being a more valuable wage when translated into full-time than the newspapers are prepared to offer. After all, if we are embarking upon this news programme, as we hope to, I do not see how we can justify a higher wage than the highest wage paid by competing institutions.

We are a State concern and we have the advantage of State finance, and in this respect we propose to compete against private enterprise. I suggest we have to proceed rather carefully there, and while we have no intention of acting in a niggardly manner in regard to the payment of our employees, we have nevertheless to take into consideration the payment made to employees of competing concerns.

Capital has been made of the fact that this man may have to act in the capacity of sub-editor. He may for the time being. We cannot afford to employ a special sub-editor to edit the news of one part-time reporter. But assuming that we branch out and find in our employment a number of reporters, then I take it for granted the sphere of sub-editor will appear, and possibly at a later stage of development that of editor also. But we have to take our time. That is the big point. We are not going to set up, on the assumption that one man is acting as editor, sub-editor and reporter at the one time, a standard salary which we may have to follow when we are reduced to differentiation, as we possibly will be. Deputy Johnson refers to the possibility of utilising this official in the manner in which we are utilising our Announcer; in other words, employing him as a part-timer and holding him to that regardless of extended duties and hours. We have removed that grievance so far as the Announcer is concerned. He is now a full-timer. We have so allocated the work that he is able to perform his duties within the limits of eight hours. Remember, we are only beginning and we require to find our feet. We have no intention of asking a man to do more than regular duties. He may have to do so for a preliminary period, but beyond that we will find our feet. I am satisfied that in this case we have proceeded in the right way. I take full responsibility for the proposed wages. I am equally satisfied that the material which has offered itself to us is of the right kind. It is quite a suitable kind. It is not a type that has been forced to throw itself on our mercy because of hard times and hard circumstances. I am, as a matter of fact, aware that some very capable people have applied for the post, and I have no reason to regret the steps I have taken, either in regard to conditions of employment or in regard to wages.

Mr. JOHNSON

I would ask the Minister to take a note that he has made a public compact that, whoever is appointed, it is a part-time post, meaning four hours a day.

The Dáil adjourned at 5.45 p.m. until Wednesday, 1st December.