Rónán Mullen (Independent)

Guím gach rath ar mo chomhghleacaithe don téarma amach romhainn. As others have done I welcome Senator Mooney to the House. I both envy and sympathise with him because it is not normal that one gets to hear so many tributes to oneself in one's lifetime outside one's retirement. I also sympathise with him because the number of tributes paid to him is greatly in excess of the number of vocational panels to the Seanad and I foresee difficulties. None of that in any way takes from the tributes that are undoubtedly deserved. He comes with a great reputation already and I look forward to hearing his contributions to debates and to engaging with him as others will do.

I was also very pleased to hear Senators McFadden and Keaveney, who are both always very fair, raise the media treatment of the Minister for Finance over the Christmas period. I ask the Leader for a debate at the earliest opportunity on the media and how they operate. I am not talking about a session in which everybody comes in and vents their own personal spleen, vendettas or gripes against journalism. There is already too much of politicians giving out about the media. We do not need a culture in which people constantly give out about the media. We need a culture in which people hold the media to account. We will do so by identifying that the libel laws alone are not sufficient to protect people, whether in private life or in public life from the depredations of the media. We need a more thorough analysis of how the media operate. While we need to consider that under the heading of privacy, we also need to consider issues like taste and decency, and fairness and balance. We can all outline occasions and instances where the media have been unfair. However, we live at a time when all institutions are coming under scrutiny and there is very little support for self-regulation. While I commend the work being done by the press council, that does not cover broadcast matters. There is no sense that the broadcasting regulatory authorities have any teeth at all. We clearly need to reconsider how we can hold the media to account in a way that does not impact unnecessarily or inappropriately on media freedom.

I say this with great sympathy to individual journalists who are caught up in a web of bad practice because of the pressure they face from their editors and media bosses. This is not targeted against any individual journalist or media practitioner. However, we definitely need a debate on how we can get the media to observe better standards. It was simply not acceptable to hear a series of journalists in recent weeks defend, as they had to do, bad practice. The most that some would say was that they would not have done it that way themselves, as if there were no objective standards which all should uphold. Clearly the timing of telling that story was a matter that should have been negotiated with the Minister's family. The idea that anybody was done a favour by being given merely two days over Christmas is an insult to our intelligence.