Paul Bradford (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister and thank him for presenting the legislation. We have been awaiting the Bill for some time. Apparently, there was much debate in Cabinet on it between Ministers. We will have a greater opportunity to tease out the matter more fully on Committee Stage. I will not pose the question of whom we shall be teasing out matters with on Committee Stage. The Minister will keep his head down and will not respond to the issue. However, I welcome the fact that he has brought the Bill to the House today.
In the brief time available I strongly welcome the first two components of the Bill. It will be good for competition and consumers and therefore should be good for the country and the economy. It is typical of the studious work the Minister has undertaken in recent years and I congratulate him on that. However, I urge the Minister to reflect on the Part of the legislation dealing with media ownership. It is only on Committee Stage that we will have an opportunity to go into this crucial aspect in more detail. It might surprise some colleagues to note that Ireland has the most concentrated media ownership in the entire OECD. That is a matter that should be of concern to us. One could ask how appropriate that is. We are all aware of the dominant single player on the national media stage which has 40% ownership of the daily and Sunday newspaper market.
When the older political scholars in this House and in the other House recall the politics of olden times, from a media perspective they will refer to the great political debates between the Irish Independentschool of politics and the Irish Pressschool of politics between the 1920s and the 1940s where both media outlets presented a rather black and white view of the world. In one sense it was not a dangerous presentation because everyone knew which party the Irish Independent then supported and which party the Irish Presssupported. It was not in any way a form of hidden propaganda. We must be much more careful with new media. We must be concerned about putting sufficiently strong legislation in place to deal with media mergers. We must pose the question of whether it is good for one player to become dominant in a relatively short time, not just for the media and competition reasons but for the citizens of this State.
Everything about public life should be open to debate, analysis and counter-opinions. One person’s strong argument should be equally challenged by someone else. That makes for good, healthy debate, good democracy and good government. We are creeping slowly to a media situation where one strong voice will dictate. To varying extents, the Minister and I are victims of a single newspaper headline in 1997, which for better or worse literally decided the result on the day of a general election. The headline in question was “It’s Payback Time.” That was admittedly 17 years ago but it shows the power of one headline and what it could do. Arising from that we had Mr. Ahern rather than Mr. Bruton and we had the Celtic tiger rather than something more modest. Today’s economic crisis resulted from that piece of political theatre. I do not want the same thing to happen again. I do not want to see a headline in two years’ time, four years’ time or ten years’ time that is representative of a singular, dominant media person or group which can dictate and dominate politics and public life.