The response to the financial difficulty has been a decision to curtail services so that the whole output is limited. This appears to be a rather dangerous development in regard to such a powerful and important part of the educational system of the community. We recall the extraordinary urgency with which the television station was introduced in the first instance. Most of us were impressed at that time by the speed at which it was created, but we were also, of course, impressed because we knew the Government knew of the necessity to devise and to take control of, to the extent that that was possible here, some kind of a television service which would be a creation of our own, as a people, a community, a society, and which would provide an alternative form of education and entertainment to those available then from other countries.
I must confess I was not concerned by the fact that we then had begun to breach the famous paper wall around our cocoon society. This development of television meant the creation of an enormous gap leading to what is now clearly to be seen as the complete fragmentation of the very rigid, nearly impenetrable censorship of social ideas, cultural ideas, political ideas, ideas in relation to literature and art and every other form of human activity.
As I said the last day on which I spoke, it would be a very valuable activity on the part of the Government to carry out a comprehensive social study or assessment of the changes which have taken place in our society as a result of the advent of television in our community. In the light of the fact that the Government knew of the urgency of the need for the provision of a service and knew of the, to them, considerable dangers involved in the breaching of the censorship of ideas here held so rigidly during the past 50 years in the Press and radio and in our educational system, it is strange that they should now appear to feel that this protection of our people which was implicit in the establishment of our national television service should not be any longer as important as it once was.
The home output contribution has been run down, reduced in response to a shortage of money. I am sorry in many ways this has been done. I think it is the incorrect response to the situation. I am sorry because of its implications in regard to the standard and quality of the service. I am sorry for the people who may lose their employment—for the artists, the creative workers of all kinds, who may be denied outlets for their art and creativity in our national television service. But it seems strange that this sense of urgency which was there when the service was established seems to have left the Government, who do not appear to believe any longer that the exposure of our people to very powerful outside influences is much more severe, much more serious, much more greatly expanded than when our service was set up in the first instance; and that if the service is to be run down this action is not being taken in a vacuum but at a time when the counter pressures, when the outside distractive influences, are greatly increased.
I wonder if the full implications of this are understood by the Government. We have a situation in which our people now press a button on a television set and can tune in to the Northern Ireland services of UTV and BBC, to BBC 1 and 2, to the Independent Television service from Harlech— to the various forms of alternative viewing, both intellectual and entertainment programmes. These are being made available readily and widely throughout the whole community.
As I have said, if one carried out a social survey on the changes that have been made by what one could call the minimal impact of outside entertainment and educational influences of one kind or another in the time since our service was established, what will the likely effects in our community be when we have a greatly increased number of alternatives to those already available when we accede to the Common Market? No doubt with scientific advances our viewers will be able not only to tune to Belfast and London but to Paris and Berlin. Bonn and Rome. Amsterdam and Copenhagen. Stockholm and Helsinki—all very powerful communities and societies culturally.
In that sort of situation is it not extraordinary to find that the decision of Telefís Éireann, simply on the basis of the idea that the Government are losing money on the service, is to run down the service. Is there any idea at all as to the repercussions of that?
We already start with the limitation of a television service which necessarily must be less attractive because we simply cannot afford to compete with the great and wealthy nations, particularly Great Britain and, later on, France, Italy, Germany and the Scandanavian countries. The Government do not appear to be able to take into consideration the changes that are likely to take place as a result of the fact that our home station must become less and less attractive to the Irish viewer and that they will look for alternatives around Great Britain, around Europe and not only around the United States but, most interesting of all, because of the development and, no doubt, improvement of satellite transmission of the television services, around Russia, China and Hungary, and all of these other societies who have attitudes, values and political ideologies which for so long we have ignored here as not existing at all, presumably on the principle that if we ignored them long enough they would go away. It seems to me that it is Telefís Éireann who are going away and it will be these other television services who will take over. I am sorry in some ways; in other ways, it must lead to a great measure of enlightenment in our community, and for that reason I must welcome it to some extent.
On nearly every Estimate I must raise this corollary of the Government's belief in the capacity of private enterprise capitalism to create the wealth needed to provide the quality of services we require, whether it is health, education, care in old age, employment or any other service. We now see it as it affects the Department of Posts and Telegraphs and, in particular, as it affects this very powerful influence in any contemporary community, our television service.
I should be interested to know what are the figures in relation to the viewing pattern in the community where alternatives are already available. Would the Minister give us some information on the reasons for the recent resignation of the man in charge of the consumer research department whose job it was, I understand, to try to find out how much Telefís Éireann was looked at, where, what particular programmes were important. I should imagine this was a vital part of any service, to find out the extent and popularity of the programmes put out by Telefís Éireann in informing them how they might go ahead in the future and how they might alter any system they might have or any programmes which they might think were popular and which, in fact, were not popular.
Before coming to the matter of the Minister's intervention in Telefís Éireann, I should like to digress for a moment to ask him some questions. I understand he is responsible for the Radio Éireann Orchestra, although I see very few, if any, references to it. I should be glad to know what is his personal attitude. Deputy Hilliard took an intense personal interest in the orchestra. I am involved with other Deputies in the Kennedy Memorial Hall, and I wonder if the Minister would give us any information about what plans he has or how he would look on the proposal to provide facilities for the very fine Radio Éireann Symphony Orchestra, or what is likely to happen in the event of the Gaiety ceasing to become available. It is, as the Minister probably knows, acoustically a very inadequate concert hall at best, but there is a possibility that it may go in the whole process of the development of Dublin, or the destruction of Dublin, by the developers.
What is likely to happen, in that event, in regard to the activities of the symphony orchestra? One of the tributes to the people of Dublin in spite of the inadequacy of musical education in our schools and elsewhere, is the degree of popularity of the concerts given by the symphony orchestra. Would the Minister tell us what is his attitude to the symphony orchestra? What is the total complement? What is its present complement? What is the status of the people employed in the orchestra? How many of them are temporary; how many of them are permanent? As regards the temporary ones, why are they temporary, and does the Minister intend to keep them that way? There are many Government Departments, as the Minister probably knows, in which this problem exists. The recent conflict in the psychiatric hospitals arose out of this question of temporary employment. I think he is also responsible for a certain amount of this in relation to the orchestra and I wonder would he look into this whole matter.
There is a slight element of fear in relation to the orchestra and this goes back a very long time. I remember that my colleague in Clann na Poblachta years ago, Mr. Michael Fitzpatrick, was rather angry at the fact that we had foreign musicians in our orchestra. Of course, the truth was that we had no native musicians because of the inadequacy of our educational system. If the foreign musician happened to be qualified for the work he had to be employed even if we did not wish to employ him.
One of the things that has always fascinated me is this peculiar national bigotry about foreigners. I met it recently in the Department of Foreign Affairs when I was inquiring about the extension of the passport of a young North African friend of mine. The general impression was that this was another of these impecunious foreigners who would be left on our hands. It struck me, and it always strikes me, that as a nation which must have many more of its people as foreigners in somebody's country as a result of our emigration over half a century and more, we are very intolerant of this concept of the foreigner in a strange country and instead of being understanding about it we tend to exploit the fact that some of them are here and cannot complain because, for some reason, they are not able to go back to their own country. I should be glad if the Minister would answer some of those questions.
I wish to refer to the new radio station very briefly because we dealt with it the other day on the Gaeltacht Estimate. As I said then, this station is something that I think could have been useful about 20 years ago, before television, but even now it is better to have it than to have nothing. I hope the Minister will insist that the Gaeltacht people are given as much authority as possible over the station. I recently read a statement by the board that they were about to give the Gaeltacht this service. I dislike that attitude. Considering the disabilities under which many of them have lived and the disabilities of the educational system up to very recently in the Gaeltacht areas, they are a wonderfully talented people in the Gaeltacht and we want to see them use the radio station and ideally use the television service very much more than they do. They should have access to both services. There is an element of paternalism about the approach to the radio station which I think is unwarranted but is inherent in the attitude of the Civil Service over the years to the Gaeltacht areas.
I remember Colm Ó Gaoire who was a colleague of Pearse's years ago and he had the greatest difficulty in being accepted as a teacher. He, with Pearse, spent a great deal of time teaching Irish in the Gaeltacht areas. He had the greatest difficulty in being accepted as a teacher of Irish in his area. He was a difficult man in some ways, a very charming and attractive person but apparently difficult to deal with and for that reason even he found it hard to be accepted as a person who could be trusted to teach the language in a recognised school. I sincerely hope native speakers will be given full and continuous access not only to radio programmes but especially to control of the radio station also.
I should like to protest at the continous exhibition of violence on television. There is an extraordinary acceptance of this pattern of violence, unthinkingly apparently, by those who control the television service. It appears that violence constitutes a very high percentage of the average television programme and particularly on the programmes beamed at children. Our service in relation to children carries an extraordinary amount of violence even in the puppet shorts in which aggression and assault always seem to predominate in the relationship between the people portrayed in these shows and caricatures and there is the sense of creating fun out of people's disabilities or the fact that they have been hit over the head, or have fallen and hurt themselves or whatever it may be. There are very unpleasant overtones in the programmes directed at little children. In relation to the whole pattern of cowboys and Indians and gangster pictures, general violence seems to be endemic.
I do not understand how adults can justify this indulgence in the portrayal of violence continually on such a powerful medium as television. We spend our lives as parents, as teachers, as legislators, as members of the judiciary, as clerics and so on, and in all our adult capacities telling children that we know best. The whole approach in the child-adult relationship in Ireland, in our culture and in that of Britain and most other countries is the presumption of adult omniscience and whatever the adult does is correct. Possibly that is true to some extent although I have never understood how we can talk to the younger generation about our wisdom and omniscience or the reliability of our judgment on any serious, significant issue with our record of at least two major world wars and all the horrors associated with them and say: "We know best".
However, we own and control the propaganda and to that extent we have been able to establish up to the present that general thesis as valid. Having done that, we then show adults in various films and displays of one kind or another in relationships with one another where violence is nearly always the final sanction. It always solves the question when somebody shoots somebody, hangs somebody or pushes somebody over a cliff or knocks somebody out. What is the general conclusion of the average child looking at us in our relationship with one another in the cinemas and on television and, to some extent in the theatre—they do not go to the theatre very much?
When we think of Vietnam, of Europe during the Second World War, or of India/Pakistan today, can we say it is surprising that children get the impression that the adult solution to almost every problem is to be found in the gun or in violence of one form or other? Is it surprising that there should be increasing violence among young people? In the schools in New York there is the "concrete jungle". In schools generally there is an extraordinary escalation of violence among children. The reasons for this cannot be attributed solely to television because there are other reasons for it that I shall not develop now; but one of the very powerful factors involved in developing a pattern of behaviour is watching what adults do in a particular situation. It is accepted that children learn from their parents by absorbing the attitudes of the parents. This must apply, too, to television and to films. I understand that in Britain there is now an extraordinary increase in violence among schoolchildren. Only the other day we read of an incident in which three or four children tried to hang another. Similar incidents have occurred here. Children have hanged themselves by mistake while trying to imitate something they had seen on a screen.
Recently we carried out a scientific study in a new housing area in relation to psychopathic behaviour, that is, disturbed behaviour among young people. We expected the results to be in the region of 5 per cent but instead it was a very frightening 20 per cent. This evolution of violence among young people must go back to some extent to the powerful influence of television. The extraordinary power of this wonderful but dangerous medium has been emphasised time and again. We have some control in respect of our own television station but, of course, we will have no control over the programmes that it will be possible to view when we join the Common Market and when scientific development enables us to have access to the television broadcasts of many other countries.
At page 31 of his statement the Minister said in relation to "7 Days" and I quote:
On the 28th September, 1971, members of an illegal organisation were interviewed on a television programme "7 Days" in a way which I, and the Government, considered to be prejudicial to the public interest. Following full consideration, and with the approval of the Government, I issued a written direction to the Authority on 1st October, 1971, "to refrain from broadcasting any matter of the following class, i.e., any matter that could be calculated to promote the aims or activities of any organisation which engages in, promotes, encourages or advocates the attaining of any particular objective by violent means".
Why is it a question of the Minister swallowing the camel but straining at the gnat? The Minister has removed the IRA and their violence from our screens. Later I will deal with my attitudes to that. The Minister is impressed by the implications of the appearance of these people on our screens and of the dangers inherent in such appearances but yet he disregards all the other programmes in which violence is practically continual from beginning to end. I do not watch television very often and as time goes on I tend to limit my viewing further. This may sound critical but it is meant to be critical. However, regardless of which channel one may be watching, one will notice the continual banality associated with violence, the banality of the plots and the general programme material.
There is also this exhibition of violence which is very difficult to tolerate. It is difficult to understand, too, why it should continue to be perpetrated. I had hoped that we would have adopted a different attitude to this problem and that as part of our contribution towards a new pattern of human relations which is long overdue, we might have concentrated on a completely different approach in relation to the exhibition of violence in human relationships.
There is no doubt of the influence of this portrayal of violence on children whether that violence relates to North or South Vietnam, or to any other place. There is no doubt of the influence of the Second World War on youngsters particularly in post-war Poland which, as everybody knows, was a country that suffered greatly during the war. Also on the psychiatric side we are now experiencing the effects of violence on children here at home in the Falls and in the Bogside. Some people will accept this situation and say that it is simply a matter of the children sublimating their own frustration or inability to cope with the appalling emotional stress of watching adult human beings fighting and killing one another but general opinion is that the influence is likely to be lasting and also that it is likely to be very damaging.
One of the interesting sides of violence in cinemas is that it is a gross betrayal of the youngster because in a cowboy film when a person is shot he collapses on the floor and it is all very harmless. There is none of the agony, pain and stress of violent death. We lead the child to believe that violence is like this, that there is nothing like the loss of a limb, the loss of sight or maiming, that there are no people left behind to mourn, that there is no widow or widower, no children. Violent death is portrayed as a very ordinary everyday experience. This is what allows youngsters to grow up believing in violence and service in armies. I have never understood why anybody goes into an army. I know the patriotic reasons given but that anybody could dedicate his life to learning how to kill other people cleverly seems an extraordinary thing. It has been the experience of various people involved in wars over the years that it is the difference between real violent death, that is war, and the mock affair they see on television or in the cinema which is the great betrayal of young human beings. If they knew what it, in fact, is like you would never recruit a soldier into anybody's army.
It is for these reasons that I would ask the Minister to seriously consider his responsibility as a Minister in indirect control of this very important medium. It is not simple; I know it is a very complicated problem, but it is very hard to tell young people who have been brought up in our society, a very authoritarian society in which both in the home and in school there is physical violence—everybody knows my views on that—that violence is bad. There is the essential indoctrination of the idea that there is always a violent solution for any problem starting with a slap on the hand and ending with a bullet in the head. This aspect of the portrayal of violence on our television screen is all part of a composite picture of violence which permeates our whole society and which conditions the youngster into readily accepting the idea of a violent solution for his most difficult problems.
There is the lurid, emotive, at times hysterical portrayal of our admittedly dreadful history of oppression, punitive exploitation; there is the belief in violence, the sense of grievance created by history and then the belief that violence is a relatively harmless thing; simply a question of somebody going "pop" with a gun and somebody keels over. All these things taken together make the young person who listens to the boy or girl on television who is in the IRA, in the Provisionals or in the Officials, whichever the Minister has taken exception to, advocate violence, ready material for the argument because he has heard that argument all his life. He has suffered from that argument in various ways. Therefore, it is not really strange that young people, seeing or feeling that we politicians have not found a political solution for a long-standing grievance, when they are told that there is a solution through violence are ready to take it up and use it.
This decision which the Minister has taken to supress the exhibition of certain pictures on the television screen is reacting in much too simple a way to a very complicated situation. While I favour anything which will reduce or preferably eliminate the existence of violence between Irishmen, this simplistic solution accepted by the Minister to simply show no more of these people on the television screen is not really the answer to the problem with which he is faced.
The dilemma, of course, is if we had not seen or if the British public had not seen the excesses of the British troops in the North, the violence in the North, the appalling consequences of the bombings and the killings, the funerals, the people widowed, the children, it is possible that we might not have got the Compton Report. To that extent, somebody could make the case that this has had the beneficial effect of making somebody take action. To what extent is the reaction a controllable reaction? Where does it end? This, of course, is the Minister's problem. What is the impact on us, sitting down here in relative safety and security, when we watch our people killing one another, maiming one another, inflicting violence on one another?
Also, of course, there is the effect of seeing an army from outside come in and behave in the way the British Army has done latterly—not in the early days—but latterly. The immediate response is one of anger but anger can lead to what the Minister has cited—the youngster going North and taking reprisal. The mature response is very much more complicated. The mature response is to find out why people are behaving in this way. That, of course, brings up only part of what I dealt with in relation to the child's upbringing, background, education, parental relationship, adultchild relationship. Only in part does that deal with the problem of the individual's response.
With censorship in the way the Minister has imposed it, would we now have had the Compton Report? Would these terrible things be going on still if the television cameras had not been there? Have they not done some good as well as, presumably, some damage? Would those of us who lived through the thirties have been helped if we had known about the excesses of the Nazis on the Jewish population in Germany in the early thirties up to the terrible Second World War? Would we have been helped if we had known of the behaviour of the Nazis and of Mussolini in Italy? I refer to that only because we did not know. It was not until I visited Germany in the mid thirties that I began to question what was going on in Germany and I then stopped going there.
It was the fact that the German Government had the right to censor, to suppress facts that they felt would not do credit to their government, this extraordinary power of censorship of news and information, which made it possible for the appalling anti-semitic campaign to go on, leading up to Auschwitz and the other concentration camps and the horrors associated with them. If there had been television, would my generation have known earlier? Would we have reacted earlier? Would we have understood? Would we have been able to avoid the Second World War? These are relevant problems in the whole question of the use of television and the use of censorship, in particular in relation to television, or in relation to any of the news media.
The Minister dismisses his Censorship Act in just one paragraph. Referring to section 31 of the Broadcasting Authority Act, 1960, he said:
I need hardly say that it was with great reluctance that I came to the conclusion that it was necessary in the public interest to invoke that section of the Act.
It is a very dangerous thing to have done. It is a very dangerous power for a Minister to have. Since the beginning of time man has been acting "in the best public interest" or, the phrase used by the Minister, "It was necessary in the public interest". There was, for example, the Defence of the Realm Act. There were all these ideas going back to the beginning of time. Socrates took his cup of hemlock, remember, because he was corrupting the youth. That was a long time ago. That was another form of suppression, censorship, because he was saying the wrong thing. Right through history we have had authorities or governments or political parties or dictators—I am not saying the Minister is a dictator— people, who decide that they have this absolute right to determine about the use of censorship.
I often feel that the censor—and I am very fascinated by Lord Longford's activities in this regard although the particular phrase I use does not apply to him personally—is to a considerable extent like the pharisee in the Temple: "I am not like the rest of men. I am incorruptible". In some way or other he feels that he is able to know of something which will do him no damage but which will damage the public interest. That is a very arrogant, paternalistic, supercilious approach for any human being to take.
The trouble is, of course, that under the Act establishing the service this power is vested in the Government and, being vested in the Government, is vested, in fact, in a political party. I wonder if when the Minister is considering reassessing his position or the Government's position in relation to television he will bear in mind the fact that times are changing from the political point of view and will he be as content to find himself sitting on the opposite side of the House and some other Minister for Posts and Telegraphs deciding as to what he shall censor, what he shall suppress and the limits to what he considers are his powers of censorship?
A very interesting development now, of course, is that the whole of the North of Ireland trouble has created very widespread debate, in Great Britain in particular, about this whole problem of television news and television censorship. There are many television journalists in particular who are disturbed by a recent trend away from the right of the journalist to edit, to have the final say in editing any particular piece of journalism, be it for television or Press, and the vesting of this particular power in management rather than with the journalist. The British Minister, Mr. Chattaway, said that television must back the law and radio and television are required to strike an even balance between the IRA and the Ulster Government or the Army and the "terrorists", as he called them. He said that impartiality could never mean the difference between right and wrong, between tolerance and intolerance, between the criminal and the law. I am quoting The Observer of last Sunday. He imposes on the editor of the television news service the responsibility of making the final decision. In relation to ITA, I understand Lord Hailsham has been interviewed by Mr. Maudling and been advised that he too must use great care and discrimination in the use of any report sent in to him by his staff. The effects of the report must be weighed carefully. But who can be trusted to weigh? Who should be trusted?
We are still, I suppose, a little overawed by television and the power of television. We must, of course, look at it in the context of the evolution of man's relationship to man. No doubt the first demagogue was a frightened person. The printing press had very great terrors when it was first introduced and it was extraordinarily influential ultimately in leading to remarkable changes in society. Wireless in its day was very powerful. The television link to satellite support services is enormously powerful and, because it is so complex and so complicated, I doubt if it will respond to simple suppression. That appears to be the answer in the case of a programme one dislikes or something a Minister does not regard as in the public interest. The Minister is not, of course, the only politician looking at television. The Tories are looking at it too; they want what they describe as a patriotic censorship. Presumably the British Army will be shown in a good light and those who oppose it in a bad light. It is the goodies and the baddies all over again, a rather infantile approach to this very complicated problem; yet this is the approach adopted by many politicians. It saves them from examining the problem in depth. I do not think any such examination has been done. It has certainly not been done in our television service.
What one would really like to see is something on the lines of the extraordinarily generous space given by The Sunday Times to an analysis of the problem in the North. This is the kind of examination that should be carried out by television. It was quite remarkable to find The Sunday Times reporting at such length and so intensively because one would imagine the British public could not possibly be as interested in the situation there as we would be. Indeed, if a similar study in depth were carried out by one of our national newspapers into the India/Pakistan conflict I doubt if a great many of us would read it. No examination of the problem in depth has been carried out by our television service. The Northern Ireland television service always tries to include one or more Southern politicians in their discussions. To me that is a definite advance. Where there is such suspicion between North and South this does represent an advance. In our coverage of the problems we seem to concentrate on what they have done wrong, what they have failed to do, and what they must do—they being invariably the Stormont Government. Very rarely does one hear any serious discussion on our television service of what needs to be done and what must be done here in order to attempt to exorcise the fear of the Unionists in the North of Ireland.
Our television service, to my knowledge at any rate, has not been used to the extent it should be used; in fact, the reverse is the case. The Minister's own directive followed the interviewing of certain members of the physical force movement in the North of Ireland in what he appears to have believed was a favourable light. To issue a directive saying, "By order of the Minister" is oversimplifying the problem. The difficulty is the suppression of the minority point of view which has commonly occurred here over the years. Why are we afraid of a minority point of view on television? Why is it so rarely heard? Have we no answer to it?
I was very interested to see an old friend of mine, Mick O'Riordan, being interviewed on television the other day. It is the first time I have ever seen him on television. All his life he has been a most articulate, Marxist, humanitarian, kindly, compassionate apologist for the Communist way of life. Why has he not appeared on television before? Why has the minority point of view hardly ever appeared on our television screen? Why are we so frightened of it? Is there no answer to it? Are our television interviewers frightened of such a confrontation? Obviously Paddy Gallagher was not, but are the majority frightened of such a confrontation? Why has this great debate which now divides the world —the left-right, socialist-communistcapitalist conflict—never been seriously discussed by people with a serious interest on our television screens? Like so many other problems which have occurred here over the years we believe, if we ignore it, it will go away; but of course that is not happening and it is most certainly not going away.
The extent to which one is concerned for minority opinions, whether they be Mick O'Riordan's or Irish speakers in the Gaeltacht, seems to me to determine the calibre of one's attitude to the whole democratic idea in society. In relation to the development of a Gaeltacht radio station my colleague, Deputy Tully, said he did not think it was worth giving them the money, that was an aside which he did not give much thought to, but again they are a minority.
There have been very great changes in Telefís Éireann over the years. The Government thought they had everything fixed and that by appointing a board, the majority of whose members were well-known supporters of the Fianna Fáil Party, everything would be all right. What happened was quite different. As television is a new medium most of the people involved were young people, and to that extent they were pretty iconoclastic and not very dependable when it came to recognising the laws and the rights of the Establishment. It was a very lively television service for a number of years but then great changes took place, as we all know. For the unfortunate people involved we had the very frightening experience of the "7 Davs" Inquiry, the loss of Lelia Doolan, Jack Dowling and eventually Maurice McGonigle. This had a sort of Admiral Byng effect pour encourager les autres. One can hardly blame those who survived, and who sat down and were counted on that famous occasion, for being circumspect about the questions they ask and the kind of programmes they devise.
They tended inevitably to end up with fairly right wing views. For that reason it was not a bit surprising to me that they would feel well-disposed to the neofascism of the "Provos" or the views of the "Officials" in their sympathetic handling of these people on television. But again this problem was created by the Minister and by the policies followed by the Government over the years. The people isolated in these very important positions in the television service happened to be people who in some cases were sympathetically disposed to violent action of this kind in the North of Ireland. They used their position as key journalists to put forward these points of views. We all know full well that this occurs. Politicians are lucky because when they have a political point of view they can at least join with people who, while they may not all share the same views, are likeminded: Fine Gael, Labour or Fianna Fáil.
A journalist who has political points of view is in a difficult position because the Press in our society, the radio and now television, are predominantly conservative. For that reason whatever the journalist's own private views may be he feels to earn his living he has to keep quiet about things but I do not think there is any one of us who has contact with public life who does not know what the private political views of most of the journalists concerned in public life in Ireland are. It must come through in the end but that then brings us to the position where we are again faced with the dilemma of "Is it they who have to decide, is it to them we leave the power of deciding that something or other was put in or left out" because it was, to use the Minister's words, necessary in the public interest to do that.
I have always accepted that all of the communications media in our society are predominantly conservative or predominantly right wing in their orientation. In fact, recently when Eamonn McCann appeared on a programme and criticised, quite rightly, the censorship, I was surprised at the naivety of somebody who would not, as a serious socialist, accept that it is the function of these various media, controlled by conservative groups, boards, directors, or whatever they may be as they are predominantly in our society, certainly in relation to the mass circulation press, radio and television to put forward certain viewpoints. It is rather naïve to expect them to put forward anything but the right wing conservative point of view because it is the function of these media to preserve the establishment in this vertical class structure organisation.
The rather crude act of censorship by the Minister where he comes in and tells us about it, appealing to section 31, in some ways is nearly more welcome than the very much more sophisticated, but equally effective censorship of the individuals, who happening to have particular points of view, whether pro- or anti-violence, right, left, liberal or whatever they may be, happening to be in these positions of authority, use them. It is possible, instead of coming in and saying that you may not say that, to apply precisely the same effects in rather more, as I say, complicated, sophisticated ways than the Minister's blank suppression to the tarring and feathering of the IRA. I suppose that is a form of censorship.
You may not hold a particular point of view, take a particular decision. In the present context of the situation in the North of Ireland and of all the other factors to which I referred, of the conditioning of the minds of youngsters, of our own failure to provide a political answer and their sense of frustration, if it prevents some of them from attempting to use violence or to suffer the results of violence, then it seems to me that must be justified but conditional as I have said on the very many other factors involved. I wonder if the Minister fully appreciates the extraordinary responsibility which he has as Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, which is a very recent one because everybody knows the time was when the Estimate for Posts and Telegraphs went through with a few cursory remarks from somebody or other about the bad telephone service and that was the end of it. Now the Minister is really in an extraordinarily important Department.
As I said at the beginning, looking back on what has happened as a result of the introduction of television, the changes which have taken place, I believe they are remarkable changes in my experience at any rate. I believe people are very much more enlightened, less afraid and frightened than they were. They are very much more prepared to consider ideas that prior to that they would not have thought of at all. Prior to television conditions here were such that I frequently, speaking to the public would say, with 90 per cent certainty, that if I was to ask any audience I was addressing, a student audience particularly, to give me the answers to ten or 11 particular questions on capital punishment, corporal punishment, communism, liberalism or whatever it might be that you would probably get 90 per cent unanimity in the answers, there was such a magnificent form of censorship here of suppression of information from outside, of opinions other than those put forward in our educational system, in all of our universities, all equally conservative in their outlook and in their teaching methods, all giving precisely the same answers. One can go to a university debating society and one is likely to hear any idea put forward and defended. There is a much better understanding of the complexity of life. The old ideas are being questioned in the community, even if they are being less questioned in our television service.
Quite soon it will be possible to tune in to practically any television station in any capital in the world and listen to views emanating from these places. Unfortunately because of the rigid, authoritarian, didacticism of our educational system, many of our young people will not be fully prepared for the wide range and scope of ideas with which they will be faced when they can look at and listen to programmes from Stockholm, Helsinki, Peking, Moscow, Paris, Munich, Vienna, the Middle East and Africa. For those people who had such an enjoyable time in the dear old cocooned society where all was best, a rather frightening time is ahead.
Much as I welcome the intellectual and political advances that must follow access to world opinion, I should not like to see Telefís Éireann fail. I believe we must create something unique and special to us and to our culture. In spite of the cross words I have uttered frequently about life in our society, I believe we are capable of doing this. One of the things that might be considered a defect in our character, but which is a quality also, is the power of creativity, of mythmaking, the great story tellers we are known to be. To that extent we can create such a television service that it is conceivable that not only will our own people tune in to Telefís Éireann but people from abroad from Peking, Moscow, Budapest, Paris and other places would tune in to Telefís Éireann.
Does the Minister seriously believe this will happen having regard to the programme he has put forward here for Telefís Éireann? There is a running down of our services, a cutting down of supplies and there has been a loss of magnificent, talented, brilliant and artistic individuals like Lelia Doolan, Jack Dowling and Muiris MacConghail and, indeed, Thornley and Keating. By denying the television service funds and talent we will see the time when no one in Europe will be concerned about what is going on in Dublin and precious few in Dublin will be concerned about what is happening at Montrose.
