Dealing with section 4, I found a number of faults in its presentation even though there are a great number of words in it. Specifically, no qualifications whatsoever are prescribed for membership of the commission as such except that Members of the Oireachtas or the RTE Authority or their officers or servants are ineligible. The Oireachtas have no control whatsoever over these appointments nor any power to investigate the suitability or qualifications of the proposed appointees. Nevertheless, these persons are to be in a position where they are to be removed only by resolution of both Houses of the Oireachtas, as if they were Supreme or High Court judges protected by Article 35 of the Constitution.
I respectfully submit that this is an exercise in nonsense which should be rejected out of hand. As I have said already, this section covers four pages of the 13½ pages that go into the Bill, covering details of the type of case which the commission may investigate and so on. When this Bill was first presented the media were thrilled with it. Here was the Minister implementing a promise he had given of setting up a watch-dog and taking the power away from himself, something like the Minister for Local Government setting up the statutory bodies who consider appeals, thus taking the matter out of political hands. He was taking away the right which former Ministers had to give specific directives in various areas. No doubt the intention of these four pages was to create the impression that the commission would be a powerful controlling influence on RTE, that we could all go home fully satisfied that everything was specifically laid on the line for the Authority, that strict control and impartiality would be operated and things would be kept that way, and that we were going to have no more maverick imbalance within the machinations of RTE because of the judicial eyes of this commission.
But things are not as was suggested at that time. I have asked the House already basically to plod with me through pages 3, 4 and 5 to the middle of page 6 of this Bill, and they will find this little subsection (7) concerning what happens when all of the ritual circumnavigations that have been prescribed in pages 3, 4 and 5 have been complied with and performed and the report on the complaint reaches the RTE Authority.
May I ask the Minister are the Authority to take speedy steps to redress the offence if an offence is judged to have been committed? That is not what subsection (7) says. What subsection (7) says is that when the Authority receive a statement of a decision of a complaint from the commission then—carrying on to subsection (9)—the Authority shall within 14 days specifically inform the commission as to whether the decision is accepted by the Authority. This means that the commission, provided for at such length, by this subsection, have no real power whatsoever to control RTE and are no more than a piece of toothless verbosity. The small print in subsection (7) shows that the insurance policy, which is what section 4 is supposed to be, is worthless. So far as the Bill goes RTE might light its pipe with the commission's report. This might sound ridiculous, but as an end product this is what section 4 of this Bill means.
Some people may think that the existence of a commission and the possibility of adverse reports would suffice to keep RTE on the straight and narrow and ensure that they would deal with all matters objectively and impartially. The hope of the Minister in this regard is that by setting up this complaints commission the Authority will be able to keep their operatives on the straight and narrow.
One of the Sunday newspapers reproduced a photograph recently of two scarecrows standing in a field in my constituency and that newspaper made reference to the fact that they were still continuing with the old-fashioned way of trying to keep away the crows. I compare section 4 with the scarecrows and the presentation and dressing of those scarecrows. It spreads over four pages and is an effort to frighten the mavericks within RTE who might be tempted to continue with an unbalanced presentation of programmes. The Minister is giving statutory authority to what is already in existence. Yesterday the Minister made reference to reports which had appeared in the RTE Guide and today he spoke of guidelines and various decisions of the commission being used to keep the Authority on the straight and narrow. I intend to quote from a report of the Broadcasting Complaints Advisory Committee which appeared in the RTE Guide on November 29th in relation to a complaint made by the Language Freedom Movement. That report is the most suitable one to choose from rather than some of the reports referred to last night. In the case of the latter the complaints had been rejected by the complaints advisory committee.
Having made the criticism last night of operators or comperes within RTE riding their own hobby-horses I do not want it to appear that I am continuing on that track. The Minister made a justifiable point in relation to the commission when he said that we can expect that, just as a Supreme Court decision is taken as a guideline for similar cases in the future, so also would a decision of the Broadcasting Complaints Advisory Committee be taken as a guideline. We seldom have an appeal to the Supreme Court against a decision made by a lesser court based on a previous decision of the Supreme Court. I am satisfied that if the commission made a decision it would be unlikely that people with a similar complaint later would appeal to the commission. We have guidelines in regard to the conduct of business in this House. Those guidelines are often quoted to us and we are often told that precedents have been created in similar situations. This is the pattern and society demands that that sort of pattern be created.
I presume the commission will be set up, in spite of the opposition here. I do not know whether the Minister will be tempted to appoint the same personnel on this established commission. That is a matter for himself and the Cabinet and we only enter into it if the Minister decides he wants to remove them at some stage. In that event he returns to this House just as the Government must do if they wish to remove a High Court or Supreme Court judge. They are placed on that sort of pedestal. The case I have referred to, the complaint by the Language Freedom Movement, concerned the failure, as they saw it, of RTE to give publicity to a private meeting between the Language Freedom Movement representatives and the Minister for Education. They felt that RTE was being used against them. That group, I should add, did not go out of their way to any great extent to praise Fianna Fáil when we were in power. I should now like to quote an extract from the report on that complaint, as published in the RTE Guide:
RTE is not a debating society. The Committee does not accept the suggestion (made to it on several occasions) that if it can be anticipated that the participants in any programme will probably unite in putting forward a particular viewpoint it is automatically necessary or even desirable to include in the programme a speaker or speakers of opposing views. Any such obligation might be calculated to produce a series of inconclusive dull and often acrimonious debates. Such a framework may sometimes be advisable and sometimes not. A wide discretion must be allowed to programme producers whose business it is to present such news and features as in their judgement are of the greatest public significance and the widest public interest and to do so with due regard to accuracy, truth and informed comment.
That was the observation of the committee in relation to an aspect of that complaint. That was working on the basis of a code, on the acceptance of the directive of the Director General of RTE of May, 1970, which, I submitted last night, was in contrast to section 18 of the Act.
The Minister dealt with this question of balance last night. The relevant code, which I presume was set out by the director general, following discussions with the Authority, must recognise that it may not always be practicable to represent all significant views in a single programme, with another programme presented within a reasonable time to balance it. We still have that in the new Bill. I use this specific example from the complaints advisory committee report in order to make a point, because in its own way it reveals the outlook of the complaints advisory committee and of RTE. This report says that the committee do not look upon RTE as a debating society. The alternative to the debating society concept and to debate itself, is a propaganda machine and the suppression of freedom of speech, or suppression of freedom of speech for certain people. No discretion was given by the Oireachtas to producers or anyone else to suppress legitimate views publicly expressed. In so far as any non-statutory code purports to give RTE such a power it is in breach of the statutory obligations imposed on RTE in the former Bill and I hope in this Bill.
The vagueness about a reasonable time still exists and it in fact gives carte blanche to RTE to play fast and loose with propaganda and to pretend to discharge their obligations of balance and impartiality by giving a few minutes now and then to speakers for views which have been decried over several programmes. The looseness which was made use of in the last Bill, such as the reasonable period part, is something which should not have been built into this Bill. I respectfully suggest that what is really needed is something that was mentioned from this side of the House when the Minister and his party were represented here, that was that there should be an Oireachtas Committee set up with powers to call on RTE to account for failure to comply with the statutory conditions and the limitations prescribed for RTE by the Oireachtas, if that arises. That should be set up instead of this type of selected complaints commission in view of the fact that the Authority are now going to be created by the Government and can only be sacked by the Oireachtas.
It is remarkable that we can have a free and frank discussion in the House on this Bill. The difficulty is that once the Bill is passed into law, if Deputies make any effort to raise a question here, referring to what they might see as mishandling of programmes on RTE they will be told politely by the Minister that there is an appropriate channel through which they can address their complaints, that the Minister felt that it would be improper to interfere or to convey the problem through his office to the Authority, and that the proper procedure would be to convey complaints through the complaints commission. I apologise for holding the Minister in this instance. I have spelt out a number of points that I would like him to comment on. The major fault of this section apart from the other faults is that no matter how serious a complaint is or how justified a complaint may turn out to be, the complaints commission have no teeth.