The battle for the airwaves

When RTÉ began, politicians felt they should control its output. Their attitude clouded relations for years, writes John Horgan

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin. Once upon a time there was a small country with a small television station, which most of the people watched, partly because many had nothing else to watch. One day the producer and presenter of its most popular programme thought it would be a good idea if the people who run the country - the politicians who were in government - could come on his programme and speak directly to the people. Some of the politicians thought it was a good idea too. But the head of the government thought it a very bad idea, and he banned it. He was so cross that he spoke to the station's head, and the programme's producer got a flea in his ear.

It was only a very small flea, of course, because the head of the television station privately thought it would be a very good idea too. Almost 40 years ago, however, when these exchanges took place between Gay Byrne, Jack Lynch and Kevin McCourt, it was an idea ahead of its time. Today, when politicians of every stripe will trample each other to death to get on The Late Late Show, in spite of the gruesome fate met there by Pádraig Flynn and others, the episode is barely believable.

The history of RTÉ's news and current-affairs programmes is peppered with instances such as this, which now look archaic to the point of quaintness but still help to illustrate how dramatically things can change. Today, for example, religious and political advertising is banned. Contrast this with 1948, when the archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, then only a quarter of the way through his 32-year reign, was allowed to appeal on Radio Éireann for funds to help Italy's Christian Democrats combat the menace of godless communism in their country's first post-war election. The appeal raised the equivalent of €300,000 today.

The most important insights to be derived from any detailed study of the news and current-affairs output of our public-service broadcaster since its inception, in 1926, however, have to do with trends and influences rather than with particular instances of censorship, risk-taking or public response.

The period from 1926 to the end of 1961, when its television service was introduced, can usefully be divided into two periods. The first, which lasted for some 20 years, saw 2RN and its successor, Radio Éireann, ensconced on the top floor of the GPO, producing, from studios that were airtight rather than air conditioned, a range of music-dominated programming. In the 1930s one TD was even driven to complain that, on Sunday nights, the announcer would solemnly declare, after reading a few sketchy bulletins from London, Budapest or Washington, that there was no Irish news.

But the then taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, had other plans. In 1947 he authorised a huge leap forward by providing finance for not only a reinvigorated newsroom but also an outside-broadcast team, an orchestra and a repertory company.

Successive governments warily flirted with the idea that broadcasting might be given more autonomy. This led to the Broadcasting Authority Act of 1960, which took two huge steps: it set up a national television service and put the existing radio service and the new television service under a new semi-State body with a high degree of autonomy. In doing so it set the scene for decades of confrontation, compromise, trench warfare and power politics.

The context was significant. Fianna Fáil had been in power for almost four years. It was to remain in power as a single-party government for another 12, in an era in which the fact that Labour was anti-coalition almost ruled out the formation of an alternative government. As Fianna Fáil won successive elections in 1961, 1965 and 1969, the locus of political opposition began to shift away from the Dáil and into the media. In broadcasting, in particular, there was a new breed of journalist. Although RTÉ's news division was staffed almost entirely by journalists with print backgrounds, the programmes division attracted young graduates with neither journalistic experience nor a particular allegiance to the status quo.

As they sought to push the boundaries of what was permissible, politicians reacted at first with puzzlement, then with annoyance and, finally, with a distinct sense of lèse-majesté. The problems were compounded by the fact that there were now no authorised channels of communication between politicians and broadcasters. When enterprising (or angry) ministers tried to jury-rig such channels, as in 1966, when Charles Haughey, as minister for agriculture, tried to influence reports of his dispute with the National Farmers' Association, howls of censorship filled the air; on that occasion the head of news, Pearse Kelly, was forced to resign.

Politicians, indeed, seemed to have been labouring from the beginning under the misapprehension that all broadcasting about politics would be controlled by the parties in the Dáil, much as they allocated speaking time there. Initially, therefore, political broadcasting was rigidly choreographed. As Muiris Mac Conghail described it later: "The politician on RTÉ, like the child, was seen but never heard, talked about but never talked to."

The first politician to appear on live television was the uncontroversial Senator W. A. W. Sheldon, in 1966. It was not until even the politicians realised that the public was increasingly tired of shouting matches interspersed with turgid propaganda that a new wave of current-affairs programmes began to develop. These included Broadsheet, produced by Jim Fitzgerald, and the first incarnation of Seven Days, under Lelia Doolan, with Dick Hill and Eoghan Harris as editors. Féach attacked sacred cows from behind the palisade of the Irish language.

The pressures on news and current affairs in the new station were not only political. In the course of a controversy that ran from 1967 to 1969, Doolan, Jack Dowling and producer Bob Quinn resigned from the station amid allegations that commercial considerations were influencing some programmes, in particular the consumer show Home Truths, of which Dowling was the producer.

Politics raised the temperature more than anything else, however, and there is a distinct sense that, even before the North exploded, governments essentially disapproved of a lot of RTÉ programming but could neither confront nor ignore it. The second incarnation of 7 Days (the title was changed), after 1967, under Mac Conghail, gave them what they thought was a splendid opportunity in 1969, when a report it broadcast on illegal moneylending in Dublin evoked the hostility of the Garda and, in turn, a full frontal assault by the government, which set up a judicial tribunal to investigate not the extent of illegal moneylending but the programme itself.

To alarm and despondency within the station, the tribunal came down heavily on the government's side, implying that broadcast journalism, if it were to escape criticism for its coverage of public affairs, would have to furnish judicial levels of proof for its allegations.

And worse was to come. As the North lurched into crisis in the late 1960s, RTÉ's attempts to provide balanced coverage consistently fell foul of most of the powerful vested interests involved. This resulted in, first, the directive issued to the station at the end of 1971 under Section 31 of the Broadcasting Authority Act. This section, never formally invoked in the 11 years since the passage of the Act, empowered the government to direct RTÉ to refrain from broadcasting "matter of any particular class". In this instance it banned RTÉ from broadcasting anything that could be interpreted as promoting the aims or activities "of any organisation which engages in, promotes, encourages or advocates the attaining of any political objective by violent means".

The government refused to clarify its vague directive, a situation that was to lead to the dismissal of the entire RTÉ Authority the following year, after a radio report one Sunday lunchtime by Kevin O'Kelly, based on an interview he had recorded with the IRA's then chief of staff, Sean Mac Stiofáin. Although the directive was subsequently reissued in a form that gave more explicit guidance to the station (by Conor Cruise O'Brien in 1975) it was to remain in existence in one form or another until 1994, when Michael D. Higgins got the government to agree not to renew it.

With hindsight two important factors can be identified with some clarity. The first is that the government was acting at a time when the sensitivities of Leinster House were exacerbated not only by the juxtaposition of news about (or comments by) paramilitaries with statements of government policy but also by the policies and reactions of the British government. The second is the realisation, not widely shared by broadcasters at the time, that many of the station's senior executives were not the supine instruments of government that many of Donnybrook's Young Turks felt them to be but defenders, behind the scenes, of a concept and practice of public-service broadcasting that was, and remained, a very endangered species indeed.

That said, the Section 31 controversy had a chilling effect on programming for years thereafter. O'Kelly's conviction for contempt of court after he refused to identify Mac Stiofáin (now charged with IRA membership) as his interviewee starkly underlined the point. Another by-product was the fact that RTÉ's policy on the ban effectively meant there was little or no archive material for one of the most critical periods in 20th-century Irish history. These were huge losses, and they cannot now be undone.

It is worth noting that the Mac Stiofáin incident was anomalous in that it was virtually the only occasion on which radio attracted heavy government artillery. Since the extension of radio broadcasting hours in the late 1960s, sound broadcasters had been stealthily carving out a successful new role in news and current affairs. John Bowman's Day By Day, the Sunday lunchtime news programme, the women's programmes pioneered by Marian Finucane and Clare Duignan and, from the end of 1984, Morning Ireland all reinvigorated the older medium.

It would be naive in the extreme, of course, to imagine that in all these matters RTÉ itself presented a single, undifferentiated aspect, inside or out. There were huge tensions internally, between news and current affairs and between groups of broadcasters, which led to the emergence of a succession of conspiracy theories. In the hothouse atmosphere of the national broadcaster these flourished, particularly in the late 1970s and early 1980s (the hunger strikes were the fulcrum of this period), when there were widespread allegations of undue influence at the station by members or supporters of Official Sinn Féin/the Workers' Party. The programme that was the target of at least some of these allegations, Today Tonight, established under Joe Mulholland a reputation for hard- hitting and original programming that matched any of its predecessors'.

Today the controversies are more muted. Governments and broadcasters patrol their own, adjacent territories carefully, each with a sharp sense of what is happening on the other side of the border. The skirmishes are fewer. But the issues remain the same, and they are legion. What is impartiality? Can balance be achieved? Is the RTÉ Authority still the best custodian of public-service values? What are the most appropriate forms of journalistic accountability? Is there a danger that the era of confrontation will be succeeded by an era of co-option? As a new Broadcasting Act goes into gestation, the facts of history can and will be quarried for ammunition in the debates that lie ahead.

John Horgan is the author of Broadcasting And Public Life 1926-1997, to be published by Four Courts Press on December 7th, €45 hardback and €19.95 paperback