THE impact of television advertising on children has concerned the Connemara based filmmaker, Mr Bob Quinn, for many years. As a member of the RTE Authority for the past two years, he has been making the case for greater restrictions on such advertising.
RTE's decision to ban advertising from preschool programmes has not satisfied him, however, and he has now called for a complete ban on all advertising directed at children. He suggests this should start with an embargo on toy adverts from October to the end of December.
Mr Quinn detailed his concerns during a lecture at the Sligo Social Service Centre on Thursday. His public intervention will not be welcomed by RTE management, which would see revenue losses of about £1 million if his proposals were accepted.
During his lecture, he pointed out that many of the toys advertised on RTE over the Christmas period will be made in deplorable conditions by children in developing countries who will be paid a pittance for their efforts.
He quoted statements by Trocaire last Christmas, which detailed the exploitation and poor working conditions in such `sweatshops'.
In one instance, a worker whose hand was caught in a machine was given £15 and let go. In a Vietnam factory, he said, 200 workers were contaminated with chemicals while spraying plastic toys for one multinational company. "They looked for compensation and were promptly fired," Mr Quinn said.
"TV commercials are the essential ingredient in this industry. Most of the plastic gewgaws that hardly last beyond St Stephen's Day depend entirely on TV to persuade impressionable children to plague their parents to buy them. I've had six children and I know. Without TV commercials, most of them would be left on the shelf."
He said such advertising posed ethical problems for any broadcasting company.
"To state it bluntly, the business of Christmas toy advertising on television colludes with a multinational policy of exploiting children as child labour in one half of the world and as child consumers in the other half."
RTE is "unfortunately implicated" in this, according to Mr Quinn. "I say unfortunately be cause RTE takes its public broadcasting role very seriously. Well, as seriously as it can afford to: it has 2,000 employee mouths to feed. That means it must maintain its commercial income at all costs.
"To drop its Christmas toy advertising would cost it over £1 million. Mind you, to me that sum doesn't seem much in an annual turnover of £150 million, £80 million of which comes from advertising."
According to Mr Quinn, this commercial pressure presents "problems" for RTE. "Last December, Trocaire organised a public campaign on the subject of these sweatshops. The press gave generous space to the effort. There was no mention on RTE radio or TV that I can trace, although there was plenty of coverage on independent local radio".
"This difficulty with such a subject was apparently shared by toy retailers. Trocaire wrote to 30 of the major outlets, supermarkets. Not a single one replied," Mr Quinn said.