David Norris (Independent)

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. I thank Senator Leyden for his flattering comments, which I do not believe I deserve at all. I have always regarded myself as the amateur of Joyce and I certainly have an affection still for the man and his work.

I remember the stamp Senator Leyden, who was then a Minister of State, launched in Paris in 1982 because our little committee suggested to the post office that it should produce a stamp. The one it produced was a line drawing of Joyce by Brancusi at the behest of an interesting Swiss woman, Carola Giedion-Welcker, who was a great friend of Joyce and who, subsequently, became a friend of mine. Brancusi was a very avant garde artist and this was his first attempt. It was recognisably Joyce in a human context. My avant garde friends in Switzerland were furious because they wanted something abstract and they said, "Take it back and do another one". He produced the image of Joyce as a series of concentric circular fragments and a thing like an exclamation mark and they thought that was more like it. It was the abstract essence of Joyce. It was brought back to Dublin and shown to his father, John Stanislaus, who took one look at it and said, "Ah, poor James, he's changed a lot". In any case, it is important to emphasise that this is a general Bill. It is not specifically or directly aimed at one person or interest. However, I note from what I read in the newspaper, not from what the Minister of State said, that we should be grateful to Stephen Joyce for precipitating these circumstances by making an aggressive intervention aimed at the National Library. This highlighted what may be a loophole that goes far beyond the question of the works of James Joyce and also includes the exhibition of artistic works of various kinds that may be inhibited. It could have a very damaging effect. It would be unworthy of this House if the Bill were directed at one person, however much some of us might enjoy it.

At the end of his speech, the Minister of State said the Bill is to remove doubt and that he does not believe it represents a change, but is simply consolidating the position that arises from a very complex area of legislation. He referred to this complexity in his opening remarks. It certainly is complex and that is why we got into this position. It is completely anomalous and very unsatisfactory that James Joyce should have come out of copyright in 1941, stayed out of copyright for three and a half to four years and then, during one of the tidying up operations of the European Union in which it decided to harmonise everything including the shape of bananas and the length of sausages, come back into copyright. Moreover, the Union decided to harmonise upwards in the direction of the French and German copyright laws.

I was made aware of this and informed the then Minister, a very decent and highly intelligent man who was in charge of this area at the time. However, the legislation came through as a kind of statutory instrument about intellectual copyright, which mainly concerned what I would vaguely call micro-technology, computers and the storage of information. The loophole under discussion came in as a codicil to that and it was not noticed. It was a real pity because I felt we could have got a derogation from it. After all, it is absurd that somebody should come out of copyright and then be stuffed back in. The European Union appears to have recognised this because it provided for the so-called window of opportunity, such that if one had a show, book or other work in preparation between the ending of the first copyright period and the artificial reinstatement of the copyright, one could be granted copyright possession.

The artificial reinstatement violates a good legal principal that one should not introduce retrospective legislation. As I stated, the Union tried to cover this by granting copyright possession to anybody who could demonstrate they had works in preparation between the ending and reinstatement of copyright and that is why I am still able to do my show all over the world. The reinstatement represents a very bad principle and we could have got a derogation from it.

The newspaper reports refer to an intervention by Mr. Stephen Joyce. It is an astonishing irony that a man such as James Joyce, who fought for freedom of expression, wanted to reach the widest possible audience by every means at his command and committed himself so totally against censorship throughout his life should now find his works being confined and removed from public gaze and performance and scholarship inhibited by his own estate. This would make him extremely sad. I have encountered this kind of inhibition in respect of a little puppet show for inner city kids, which was free of charge. It was closed down by the operation of the estate. This is like taking lollipops from blind kids; it is disgusting.

I notice there is a recital of the various radio and television programmes that have been cancelled as a result of this kind of threat of injunction. I have experienced this kind of behaviour as the director of the James Joyce Centre. In 1992, we had a World Wide Web broadcast of Ulysses, which used Bloom's idea of the day continuing around the planet. There was always daylight in some particular place and there were broadcasts from Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Dublin, Ankara, Cyprus, China, etc. It was marvellous. Mary Robinson was President at the time and she did a reading, as did I, and it was really lovely to feel we were all linked in this way. We intended to do it again but our sponsors were attacked. However, we were able to demonstrate legally that we should have held copyright because we had our material in preparation during the window of opportunity. Unfortunately, our sponsors included The Irish Times and Irish Distillers. The Irish Times decided to settle because it was going through a rough period and I believe it did not want any more turbulence. Irish Distillers responded as do many insurance companies. Although one may be in the right, the company will decide it is cheaper for it to settle and save itself the bother of fighting its case. If this continues, a body of case law will build up and the remaining seven years of the copyright will be very unpleasant for everybody.

I am very glad this action has been taken. It is general in nature but, specifically, it will act to rescue a very important exhibition being held in our National Library, which was the setting of one episode of Ulysses in which certain aspects of free speech are discussed. It would be appalling to think that over €12 million of taxpayers' money had been expended, quite correctly, courageously and appropriately, on acquiring this very remarkable collection of material but that the taxpayers were prevented from enjoying it and seeing what they had purchased because of some obscure and arbitrary intervention under the Copyright Act.

It is very important that this material be made available to the public in this way and I am very glad it is being done. It shows a certain stiffening of attitude if one considers the case in which the National Library inherited a very important collection of letters that were rescued by a very courageous figure, the late Paul Léon. His son, Alexis, came to Ireland for the opening of the exhibition. In a remarkable display of pusillanimity, the National Library, despite protestors such as myself, handed over to Stephen Joyce some letters, which he took with him and later claimed he destroyed. It would make me think very carefully before bequeathing material to the National Library if I believed it would hand it over to the caprices and whims of somebody who is, after all, fairly distant in generational terms from the source of that material, such as Stephen Joyce.

James Joyce wrote Ulysses, James Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake, James Joyce wrote A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and James Joyce wrote Dubliners. His descendants, quite far down the line, took no part whatever in that process of creation although they have benefited enormously in a financial sense. If anybody talks of profiteering, he should be asked what he made out of works in whose creation he played no part himself.

I was in Monte Carlo at a big conference on Joyce, which was attended by Michael Yeats and his sister. Stephen Joyce interrupted and made a very nasty accusation of profiteering against the Yeats family. In a very dignified way, Michael and his sister responded simply by saying they would not attack Mr. Joyce but that it should be put on the record that they gave their father's manuscripts to the National Library. That was all that needed to be said.