THIS study of the prehistory of RTE begins in 1950, when an Irish television service was the merest glint in the eye of the late Leon O Broin, Secretary of the Department of Posts and Telegraphs, then responsible for radio broadcasting. The story extends through the following decade, much of it inevitably a record of committees and memoranda, of inter departmental conflict and political attitudes, and the intervention of commercial interests. Initially the debate was conducted almost exclusively on the "official" level, and only O Broin's persistence kept it moving: the Departmeat of Finance quite simply saw television as a luxury we could not afford.
But with the increasing availability of British transmissions in Dublin and elsewhere, and a consequent increase in the sale and hereof receivers, popular interest began to provoke the question: can we afford not to have our own service? By 1957 the demand for action could no longer be ignored, and in October of that year a Cabinet committee was set up to discuss the most acceptable way forward. In the following year, the government brought the matter into the public arena by proposing a Commission "to examine all aspects of television broadcasting and to make recommendations to the government", on the clear understanding that "no charge should fall on the Exchequer".
Televisions might no longer be a luxury but it must not be publicly funded. Commercial involvement was seen as inevitable, even desirable, and a number of entrepreneurs, at home and abroad, had already been showing an interest. Two of these - one European, one American - were especially insistent in pressing their suit.
A new debate developed, within the new Commission and outside, on the degree of autonomy appropriate to any such enterprise: should the businessmen be given their head, with only minimal government control, or should they be subject to a strong public authority? O Broin, whose personal preference had been for a system based on the BBC "public service" model, came to recognise the need for a compromise arrangement that would accommodate private as well as public funding.
But the Commission's terms of reference were firm in their total exclusion of any public finance. So the majority report, presented in May 1959, though well disposed to the "public" model, felt obliged to recommend a commercial service operated by a private monopoly, but under the control of a public authority. Then, less than three months later, the government, in a remarkable U turn, decided to reject this proposal and "set up a statutory authority to run both television and radio without any commercial promoters whatsoever."
The quotation is from O Broin's autobiography, Just Like Yesterday, and I have italicised the final words pointing to what Professor Savage very understandably calls a volte face, reversing previous policy. How did it happen? One brief, blunt explanation current at the time was that the outstanding proposal shortlisted by the 1958 Commission came from Gael Linn, whose alleged "political ambitions" scared the government. Be that as it may, we can now with hindsight see the decision as a harbinger and symbol of the Lemass era, which was marked by the abandonment of several former entrenched positions. And we may take it that the new Taoiseach's impatient determination ensured that the necessary infrastructure for an autonomous broadcasting authority was provided with commendable dispatch.
But it would be naive to imagine that Lemass left it at that. He it was who chose the man to give overall direction in policy and ethos to the new service: this was the late Eamonn Andrews, who was already one of the best known performers in British television. One also wonders to what extent Lemass was, directly or indirectly, responsible for the failure to call on the services of Maurice Gorham, who had been director of the old Radio Eireann from 1953; earlier, a distinguished record with the BBC had been crowned by his achievement as the man who brought British television back to life after the war. Gorham himself made it clear that he "had not sought any job" in the new organisation. Which does not take from the fact that to very many people he was the obvious choice for Director General.
All this lies outside the scope of Professor Savage's study. Originally presented as a doctoral thesis at Boston College, it benefited from generous access to a range of primary sources, including archival material and personal interviews, supplemented by secondary sources in the public domain. It is a comprehensive and competent work, if somewhat marred by a number of minor inaccuracies, most irritatingly in the spelling of personal names.