I should like to make it clear that our opposition to this Bill has not been abated by anything which happened during the course of its discussion in Committee. In fact, if anything, that opposition has been strengthened because we were unable to extract from the Minister the detailed information as to the function or method of working of the agency which we think the House should have. The Minister assumed that opposition to this Bill was prompted mainly by antagonism to himself, but he was wrong in that. The anxieties and suspicions which we entertain are, I think, natural to the members of a democratic Parliament when they find the Government proposing to engage in news agency activities involving the expenditure of public money on a substantial scale.
The Minister has spoken here about other European countries and news agencies that exist in them and has advanced as one argument in favour of the Bill that most other European countries have a news agency of some sort. He is possibly aware of the fact that in France, one of the countries he mentions, the Havas Agency, one of the agencies he mentioned, was recently the subject of considerable controversy arising out of a proposal of the French Government to subsidise it, to turn it into the type of agency which, I think, the Minister intends to establish under this Bill. That opposition which developed there, and which was, in fact, expressed in newspapers circulating outside France, was also due to the feeling which people have that the operation of Government news agencies has been, up to the present, mainly a function of dictatorial Governments and that the extension of that function to democratic Governments is an unhealthy sign.
It is not true that this country is being seriously prejudiced by the fact that there is not a commercial news agency here. So far as I know, the existing news agencies that serve newspapers here and abroad are mainly commercial undertakings. There is a number of them working in competition, and it is not unusual for a newspaper to discontinue the service of a particular agency if it believes that it is not getting from it proper news coverage, and it would almost certainly happen if there was any suspicion that the news supplied was being coloured for propaganda reasons. These commercial agencies securing business in competition with one another are not free to become propagandist organisations or to colour the news which they supply, because any suspicion that they were acting in that way would lead immediately to a loss of business. The fact that there is no commercial news agency here is, as I stated during the Second Reading debate, due largely to the fact that the newspaper organisations in this country are not numerous enough or wealthy enough to support it. The principal news agency supplying news here, the "Press Association", was established by a number of American newspapers on a co-operative basis to cover their own needs in international news, and if we had here newspapers, nearly as numerous or half as wealthy as the newspapers of the United States, a news agency service established on a commercial basis to serve a similar purpose for Irish newspapers would have existed long ago. It is only in relation to international news that papers require the services of a Press agency. All the Irish newspapers, as Deputies know, cover events happening within Ireland by their own permanent staffs, or local correspondents, and they could not possibly maintain, and, in fact, would have little reason to maintain, a world-wide news agency to give them news coverage from all corners of the globe. The news coverage which they get through the existing agencies is ample. Every newspaper takes the service of more than one agency, and there is ample opportunity to ensure that news does not reach their readers in any tendentious form, because the competitive element between the agencies ensures that they will have full stories relating to every event from independent sources.
I think the same is true of news about this country going abroad. It is not true to say that there are only British representatives here. Most of the international agencies have their correspondents here, including the Havas Agency, as the Minister knows. Newspapers abroad are in precisely the same position as newspapers here in that they have independent supplies of news from competitive sources on which they can rely.
I doubt very much if this agency can establish itself anywhere as a commercial news agency. It cannot possibly hope to give a service that will compete with the commercial agencies. Because it is established under Government auspices and because it will not be dealing with the ordinary day to day news which news editors desire to obtain, it will be suspect from the start as a propagandist agency, and, like all the material that comes to every newspaper from propagandist agencies, it will be put mainly on the editor's spike. The effective work which this agency can do is very limited. Its cost, apparently, is going to be quite high, and I doubt if we are going to get value for the money we have voted. Its doubtful value and its high cost, associated with the general objection there is to Governments dabbling in news, even when they profess their desire to do it for patriotic or other beneficial purposes, justify our opposition to the Bill. That opposition, as I say, has not been abated in the slightest. I think we must indicate that fact by a vote on the Final Stage.