SHANE O'CONNOR,
Madam, - With regard to Breda O'Brien's sturdy criticism of RTÉ and the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland (The Irish Times, December 7th), one can, in all fairness, understand why RTÉ rejected advertising by the Irish Catholic and the Power to Change campaign. Such advertisements were, of course, contrary to the ethos of our public service broadcaster.
How can we know this ethos, then? By their fruits. . . and the fruits of TV nowadays are of very dubious quality indeed. Michael Scott-Joynt, the Anglican Bishop of Winchester, writing in the Tablet (December 15th, 2001), was in no doubt about TV standards in Britain: "None of us can avoid the powerful propaganda of every evening's television that depicts promiscuity, infidelity and adultery as not just normal but as mature, desirable, even inevitable - and certainly modern". The "standards" pertaining across the water apply here too.
Here are two examples at random from RTÉ. First, the week before last there were four advertisements in the commercial break during John Bowman's Questions and Answers. Three were for everyday consumer products - cornflakes, cheese and some motor car or other. Each oozed with nudge-nudge sexual innuendo. I can't recall the fourth. The point is clear.
Second, on October 25th this year, Pat Kenny's morning programme afforded the marketing manager of a British condom manufacturer five minutes of invaluable free advertising time to promote her company's latest marketing campaign. The concept was simple but effective. She was offering free condoms to Irish students, accompanied by a cash incentive of £100 sterling per student per term, for the purpose, disingenuously, of quality control testing, to determine pleasure rating, consumer needs, etc. This was a frank and irresponsible inducement to youthful promiscuity and its attendant dangers
While she was at pains to stress the "safe sex" benefits of her product, the company's own website, in its fine print, is less sanguine: "Safer sex (sic) will not necessarily protect you from all STDs. Basically, any form of sex means the chance of infection. Problematic is (sic) that STDs don't always show clear signs - HIV is spreading at an ever increasing rate amongst all of us now."
Perhaps, long ago, Ray Burke had the right idea after all. - Yours, etc.,
SHANE O'CONNOR, Green Road, Newbridge, Co Kildare.
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Madam, - What a strange society we live in. It's acceptable to encourage others to "believe" in a pint of Guinness, but you are prohibited from advocating belief in God through advertising on the national airwaves.
And for this wondrous wisdom we pay a television licence fee. - Yours, etc.,
AIDAN McCOURT, Louth Village, Dundalk, Co Louth.