Dr. Seán Healy:

I look on this in a particular way. I see the media as part of the cardiovascular system of society, where they are transmitting the story of things in the way they are and are communicating values and ideas about what the future might be like, and so on. The media are critically important but there are major issues. For example, for quite a long time they seemed to have the idea that some story was put up on the fact the climate was under pressure and so on, some climate denier had to be reported to have so-called balanced reporting, which is problematic.

I remember watching Vincent Browne back in the day of his television programme where a prominent Irish journalist, who is still in business and working out there so I will not name him, came on to that programme and he was being challenged by Browne on different things. He said he agreed with what the Government was doing and that he reported from that perspective. Much of the time that is the kind of problem we have in the media, in that the media do not operate for the most part, with notable exceptions, as a place where one can actually engage, have discussion and disagreement and have it based on analysis and on properly researched positions rather than just volume abuse, shouting and those types of things.

If we were to look back and say there are things that are there already, then I have to say that the amount of misreporting I have read over the past ten years regarding what happened in social partnership has been phenomenal.

There are many givens, most of which are false, yet they are in that space. If we were to take something mentioned by me and others, it is that if you were to depend on the national media, would you know there were public participation networks out there and a network of more than 16,000 organisations involving local community, voluntary, social inclusion and environmental organisations, all working together in policy with local government? You would not so there is quite a distance to go to get the media to engage in a really solid way that would contribute positively to having a dialogue and a genuine debate and having the arguments discussed and ideas put out there and dealt with in a honest and fair manner rather than some of the stuff we have to put up a lot of the time.