David Norris (Independent)

I do not think I have mellowed at all. I wonder about categorising and sectioning people into age groups. I understand what Senators Mullen and Quinn are addressing, that there is material unsuitable to most people over 65. Heavy metal is an example and I have never liked it. Certain things happen as one gets older, the hearing range changes and one can get sound distortion which affects one's pleasure in music. Certain kinds of music can be distinctly unpleasant for a significant proportion of people in the higher age groups. I worry about dividing society into different groups without thinking about it carefully.

Perhaps Senator Mullen can tell us if any market research has been done on the programmes this group would like. Knowing him as a thorough person, he may well have undertaken this research or he may not have had the resources to do so. Perhaps this is something one of our academic institutions, the ESRI or a group that functions for the elderly might examine. We might be quite surprised at the content of such programmes as suggested by the elderly.

As, I hope, Senator Quinn and I demonstrate, elderly people are not all grim people who want devotional services that prepare them for the grave or programmes that tell them how to rinse their false teeth before they go to bed. That is what Yeats was getting at and I cannot resist the opportunity to quote from another Yeats poem: "We who are old, old and gay". This has always made me laugh, particularly as it now clearly refers to me as well. That was not the sense in which the former Senator and Nobel prize winner, W.B. Yeats, intended it but it is one of the reasons that makes me glad we have successfully politically colonised that innocuous and irritating little word. It now means something more sensible than it did when it referred to goblins tripping down the mountainside.

Senator Doherty echoed a feeling of mine when he referred to understanding the Minister's previous difficulties about quotas. If that is true, it is also true of percentages, which may be arbitrary. If there is a resistance to quotas, logically the same resistance exists for a specific percentage. I am not against the principle but I wonder what will happen if we say we must have 10% for Irish culture, 10% for the elderly and 10% for something else. What we need, which is in some respect what Senator Mullen has sensitively proposed, is that the broadcasting authorities should be aware of, and sensitive to, the requirements of different sections of their audience. I applaud the Senator for raising this. As Senator Quinn said, it is a very positive way to look at it. We are not howling about discrimination but are saying let us do something positive. If it is to be 10%, at what time would it be? Would it all be in one slot at 10 p.m. or would it be at 6 a.m.? Many practical issues need to be teased out.

There is a strong case to be made for being age sensitive. For example, some programmes deal with the disabled, although I am not sure if it is politically correct to say "disabled" because the language keeps changing. Old fogies like me used to refer to the "disabled" which was a big improvement on what we called them before. However, programmes such as "Outside the Box" with Olan McGowan are wonderful and can attract a general audience. A good programme, which could be elder-proofed to ensure it is not grossly obnoxious to older people, might attain a much wider audience than we imagine. I am strongly in favour of the amendment.

We should also have some older broadcasters. I remember with great pleasure listening to Val Joyce on the radio. One of the lovely things about him was that one knew he was as old as a bush, and he said it himself. He fiddled around with the CDs, which used to get lost, and he used to make mildly irritated noises at the machine. It was all part of the entertainment. If we sanitise broadcasting to keep this kind of thing out, we do a terrible injustice to the whole spectrum of broadcasting.

I applaud Senator Mullen for tabling this amendment. I have some reservations about it as it stands, but I am fully in agreement with the principle of it.