The furore over Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross and their sicko phone calls to venerable actor Andrew Sachs had a very positive side-effect in that it swept the recession aside for a few days as the main news item in the British media. Irish outlets seemed reluctant to take up the story: London is no longer the centre of our cultural universe and I guess that’s a good thing.

But there are resonances here at home. Podge and Rodge are not cruel in the way that Ross and Brand were but their toilet humour is deeply distasteful to many viewers (others seem to like it.) Gerry Ryan is a very talented broadcaster but has a tendency towards crudity that puts a lot of people off listening to  him (although maybe it attracts others.)

I don’t think the generation now in its 20s and early 30s has any awareness of how repressive this society was in the past. Back in the 1960s and even later, censorship was a major issue in Irish culture. It wasn’t just legal censorship, whereby books were banned and films either outlawed or cut by the State, there was an overall air of stuffiness which was quite oppressive.

Some of us railed against it, protested, objected, spoke out. You had to go to the authoritarian Northern Ireland statelet to see films or read magazines that would be considered very innocuous by today’s standards. On my first trip to England as a student to do summer work, I immediately purchased John McGahern’s novel The Dark  which had been banned in Ireland, apparently because of a scene where the young hero excites himself as he gazes on a lingerie ad, in the Irish Independent no less.

A good deal of emotional and political energy went into opposing the prevailing censorship. Film critic Ciarán Carty, then with the Sunday Indo, now writing for the Tribune, broke many a lance in the struggle.

It may be hard to believe that, even in the late ’60s, a song called Walk On By was banned from the radio because it referred to an adulterous love affair: “I love you but we’re strangers when we meet” . Another number, Manfred Mann’s Do-Wah Diddy-Diddy was banned because “diddy” was a slang word for breast in this country.

It’s different nowadays. Anything goes. In the race for ratings, TV channels in different countries are seeking to out-smut one another. Friday night is hide-behind-the-sofa night.

It wasn’t meant to be this way. The lifting of censorship was meant to facilitate artists and writers in the sensitive depiction of human relations in their work but instead what we have is an endless stream of dirty jokes and near-obscenity aimed at perpetual adolescents. Is this the kind of society Pearse and Connolly gave their lives to create? Is this what Thomas Davis had in mind for us? Was this Henry Grattan’s dream for an independent Ireland?

What’s curious about it is that the authorities – or at least the controllers of TV and radio stations – are inflicting this on the public. It’s the world turned upside down. In the past the people sought to liberate themselves from authoritarian rule; now it’s the rulers who are seeking to ‘liberate’ the people from their traditional sense of good taste and standards of decency. Compulsory Irish has been replaced by compulsory smut.

Political debate, on the other hand, is still pretty well restricted. Not so much in an overt way but quietly, almost imperceptibly. The two-party system, whether here or in Britain, dominates the airwaves and, much of the time, the choice of opinions ranges from Tweedledum to Tweedledee although, every so often, a dissident is trotted out to show that the system is really very liberal.

It’s good that Jonathan Ross is going to suffer some pain in his pocket because of what he did. But the guy is earning so much, it won’t make much difference in the end. As the recession deepens, the massive amounts of money prominent broadcasters people are getting will come more and more into focus. Why should the public be legally obliged to pay a licence fee to subsidise these people?  There’s a question for the Inspector when s/he comes knocking on your door.

Deaglán de Bréadún