Eoghan Harris (Independent)

I welcome the Minister.

I am not a great fan of either the Broadcasting Act or Broadcasting Authority of Ireland because I have direct personal experience of them. I worked for 25 years in RTE and was often accused of being up to certain political activities there. I was mostly accused of being zealous on behalf of the Government's own instruction, section 31. I was zealous in administering the Government's position thereon. If that is a crime, tough.

Nobody in RTE ever accused me of being biased, however. During the early days of "7 Days", Mr. White, the assistant controller of programmes, the controller of programmes and I debated bias, balance and impartiality almost every day in the teams.

Although the broadcasting legislation is very detailed, ultimately a lot of it is flimflam. As the Fowler Commission pointed out in Canada in 1971, broadcasting is about programmes, and all the rest is window-dressing. Fundamentally, in a society such as ours, a small island State divided politically, the role of a national broadcaster is crucial.

Broadcasting is changing all the time. We can either opt for a free-for-all in many ways like that suggested, interestingly, by Senator Jim Walsh. According to his suggestion, the Minister would just licence various broadcasters and dispense with a national broadcaster except TG4 I believe strongly in public service broadcasting but I do not believe in the way it has gone in the past 20 years. It has declined badly in this period in regard to the operation of balance, impartiality and objectivity. One problem is that they are not sustainable ideals.

Mr. Jack White was very gracious as assistant controller of programmes in that he was preoccupied all the time with the question of fairness. He would broadly accept that one cannot be balanced. As I used to ask him rhetorically, how would one balance the Pope in a studio if he came on? How could he be balanced with the other side? With regard to objectivity, I used to ask how can one be objective about apartheid. Mr. Tom Hardiman, a former director general of RTE, said we could not be. With regard to impartiality, which is when a judge withholds his personal judgment, I ask how we can be impartial on matters in regard to disability or marginalised peoples. We cannot.

I generally believe the notions of objectivity, balance and impartiality should be replaced by a very firm and meaningful instruction from the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland that there should be fairness in every programme or, if it cannot be achieved in a single programme, over a series of programmes. What is being done should be signalled clearly such that the broadcaster would say, for example, that for the next seven nights, "Prime Time" will be coming down hard against the Government on an issue but that the Government's point of view will be aired on Wednesday night. In other words, I ask that fairness be an injunction, a culpable injunction. Broadcasters who are persistently unfair should be fired. If there are no sanctions against broadcasters who are persistently unfair, why would they have any reason to be otherwise?

I am not saying RTE broadcasters are unfair. Broadly speaking, we get a very good service from RTE, but in recent years a habit has grown involving what I call crusading. It was evident recently on "Liveline" in respect of the campaign on head shops. It was all very well but the alternative view on head shops was not heard, namely, the view that drug dealers were anxious to put head shops out of business, and that the cocaine trade had been destroyed in Dublin, on foot of which the criminal class was very angry with head shops. Deputy McDaid and others made a very cogent case against legislating against head shops in the crude way in which it was done. I am convinced by the case that the drug-dealing paramilitary-terrorist nexus was very angry at head shops, but this was not heard on "Liveline".

A certain crusading element is evident on "Frontline" from time to time in regard to Government policy. I do not mind the Government getting hammered. Fine Gael will get hammered when it takes over but it may not like it so much if it is being hammered night after night with no case being made on the other side. What I am saying is that the question of fairness should be built into the broadcasting directive such that each broadcaster should be enjoined and fair in conducting a programme and must try to eliminate bias. If there is a consistent pattern of this not being achieved, there should be sanctions. I am concerned about the drift from fairness in broadcasting.

There is a great absence on this small island of reaching out and involving ourselves directly in programme making with Northern Ireland, and with forces with programming potential in Northern Ireland. I refer, for example, to the efforts of the loyalist working class to emerge into the stage of history, struggling as they are to emerge through the UDA and UVF. I refer also to other bodies in Northern Ireland that are outside the structures of political parties that may wish to make programmes. We should have built in a provision for the stimulation of debate and programme making on Northern Ireland that would be part of a pluralist policy. We should make no apologies for it. Every state has a right to dictate policy.

I wrote a document in 1987 on RTE after the Enniskillen bombing. At the end of it, I made 13 recommendations on how we should reach out to Northern Ireland, ranging from doing programmes on the Orange Order to teaching people how an Orange drum is played. I recommended that such programmes be presented and produced by people from Northern Ireland of the loyalist tradition. That document was not regarded as being outrageous at the time. We have fallen back from that position, however, and must be more proactive regarding Northern Ireland in offering opportunities. The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland could do much here and the Minister could make his wishes known in regard to this matter.

I have something positive I want to say to the Minister on this issue. I welcome very much his opening up of the authority to the Oireachtas. Down the years, more than anybody in this House, I have experience of dealing with broadcasting authorities. I was often on the receiving end of hard lines from them, I have been suspended by them, and I have been dealt with by them in various ways. What I noted mostly about them was their weakness. They become prisoners, as with all State bodies. I served on the board of IMMA for years. It was almost impossible to get the board and the full-time people to consider anything outside their default ideology, namely, that people could do other kinds of art and that there was nothing wrong with classical art, or the views of various sections of the population.

The Minister has gone some way by opening the authority to the joint Oireachtas committee. I am very concerned about the tendency of broadcasting authorities to go native, to suffer from Stockholm syndrome and fall under the spell of what I call default ideologies. The default ideology of RTE, for example, is exactly similar to that of the BBC. That is not a good thing in Irish broadcasting. The default ideology is a sort of liberal, left-wing tolerance of all cultures and creeds. There are conservative forces in our country that are entitled to be represented also. I refer to the automatic assumption that any politician is bad news, that any Muslim or member of an Islamic grouping is always correct or that any priest is always bad news. The words "conservative", "Republican" and "Bush" automatically set bulbs blazing in the minds of RTE producers. Everyone in the House knows it is broadly true that this is the liberal default ideology which obtains. There should be a means of introducing other ideologies and ideas. The best way for broadcasting to develop would be for those involved to "Let a thousand flowers bloom". The Minister has made a good start in that regard by allowing the Oireachtas to introduce its views into the mix.