MICHAEL D. Higgins may cast a regretful glance around his ministerial office this week as he prepares to take his place on the Opposition benches. But the outgoing airwaves Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht has already discovered some of the compensations of losing office, judging by his unusually open and combative statements at a ceremony in Galway last week.
He was speaking at a graduation ceremony for 16 women from a "Women On Air" diploma course in radio communications, a joint project between UCG, the IRTC and Connemara Community Radio.
Mr Higgins first congratulated the IRTC for becoming involved in such developmental work and said it was in contrast to the approach of the previous commission.
The community radio sector had been "treated unfairly" by the previous commission, which favoured the commercial sector and repeatedly refused applications for community licences. The result was predictable: a music driven formula which was changed when it met consumer resistance.
"A barrage of music hit the air and then, gradually, people voted with their ears. They wanted stories and narratives and local radio adjusted to give the people what was appropriate. There was nothing inspirational about it."
He then criticised recent comments by the UCC president, Prof Michael Mortell, who said abolishing third level fees was a bad idea. "The day the universities run their institutions on the marketplace, on the basis that you pay for what you get, then they will have no right any longer to call themselves universities." Universities should be about "independent scholarship, access, democracy and equality".
Mr Higgins also spoke of media ownership. He said it was extraordinary that academics had carried out so little research on the concentration of media ownership in a few hands, in Ireland and elsewhere. "It has been very difficult, in the last 10 or 15 years in which I have commented on this, to find a space in which one will not be accused of some ulterior motive when one raises the question of ownership of the media.
"It is a real issue: the disappearance of the Irish Press... has been a tragic loss in relation to diversity of opinion."
He said there was an alarming lack of debate on the consequences of cross ownership by media moguls of newspapers, radio and television stations. "In our own case, combining a dominant position in the print media there are people writing about companies in which they are significant shareholders themselves."
Mr Higgins wished the 16 women the "moral courage" as journalists to tackle unpopular subjects. He hoped they would fight "the assumption that equality of treatment - in any medium; print, radio or television - means that the most populist, ill informed (comment) has to be given exactly the same weight as everything else.
"There is a difference between equality of treatment and an unconscious elevation of the mediocre to its position as the dominant. That is one of the most difficult things for anybody to say: if it goes wrong you are accused of a form of elitism.
"Yet it is an issue in the media that is not sufficiently addressed ... the idea that those who shout loudest most often can claim to be majority opinion reminds me of the woman who once, long ago, roared at me here in Galway in Devon Park, and said: `God plus one is a majority'. There is the odd radio practitioner who practises the same."