Sir, – Three cheers for Conor Brady, former editor of The Irish Times for his article (Opinion, July 27th) drawing attention to the lack of balance in the RTÉ programme Battle Station. The picture presented by the programme is of a cops-and-robbers story where the goodies are the top brass in the station and the baddies are top brass in successive Fianna Fáil administrations. This picture, though largely true is, as Mr Brady states, only part of the story. Of equal importance, I submit, was my late brother David’s famous broadcast (famous at the time) on the programme Seven Days, made with the assistance of Patrick Lyons, (future distinguished public servant and Ireland’s first Competition Commissioner), which stopped in its tracks the second attempt by way of a referendum to abolish proportional representation and replace it by the first-past-the-post system.
David’s epoch-making broadcast, for which he had no prior sanction whatever, was made on his own initiative and he risked his television career by making it. I set out the sequence of events as described by him in my forthcoming book, Lone Crusader: David Thornley and the Intellectuals, now with the printers.
In fairness to John Bowman, he does David full justice in his great book, Window and Mirror: RTÉ Television 1961-2011. It was apparently too much to expect that the RTÉ programme would follow the book in its academic balance and presentation. Instead, we had the usual over-editing and almost perpetual “dumbing down”.
If some eminent boffin in RTÉ asks me “what evidence have you that David swung the vote against change by his broadcast?” my reply is that the evidence should be in the RTÉ archives, tucked neatly away. Or is it? When David died, Jack Lynch, in a television tribute to him stated that before David’s broadcast all the indications were that Fianna Fáil would win the referendum; after the broadcast, in Mr Lynch’s words, the reports “from the grassroots” showed that the referendum would be lost.
This raises another very serious question. Some time ago I learnt to my horror that most of David’s much admired interviews on Seven Days had been deleted. Has Mr Lynch’s tribute to David also been deleted? Are deletions still occurring? How much priceless historical archive material has vanished into thin air? The mind boggles. – Yours, etc,