Censorship of the Irish media might have been responsible for unnecessarily lengthening the Troubles, the Sunday Tribune's Northern Ireland editor told a weekend conference in Dublin.
Ed Moloney said censorship, including self-censorship, had prevented the media from explaining events in the North properly, which meant that people in the South did not understand the problem as well as they should have.
People had died unnecessarily due to this type of behaviour, he told a seminar on censorship and freedom of expression organised by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties.
Mr Moloney recently won a legal battle against an attempt by British police reinvestigating the 1988 killing of a Belfast solicitor, Mr Pat Finucane, to force him to hand over notes of interviews with a loyalist and RUC Special Branch agent, William Stobie.
He said he had the distinct impression that this legal attempt was aided by a certain view of the media in Ireland. He did not believe that the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Mr John Stevens, would have tried to do what he did "if the journalist in his sights had been living in London".
Mr Moloney said it was an unfortunate truth that nearly 20 years of censorship had taken their toll on Irish journalism, and people had learned to live with broadcasting bans in the North and South. The worst aspect of such censorship measures was the more insidious self-censorship which came in their train.
"For most of the time that I practised journalism for outlets in the South, the prevailing prejudice was this: if you wrote or wanted to broadcast about the IRA or any related issue, such as the claims of innocence made by the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four and others, then you were in fact what was then called a fellow-traveller.
"You had to be one because how else could you write about such people unless you talked to them as if they were human beings, and if you did that then you must secretly sympathise with them."
He said: "I believe people died unnecessarily because of this type of behaviour. They died because the media were not allowed to explain events properly, and therefore people, especially in this State, did not understand as well as they could and should have. Was this responsible for lengthening the Troubles unnecessarily? I believe it could well have been."
Ms Marie McGonagle, from the Law Faculty at NUI Galway, said that bans aimed at denying people "the oxygen of publicity" were often counter-productive because they created a mystique.
She said the constitutional protection of freedom of expression had always been regarded as weak, and outdated defamation laws remained unchanged. It was only since 1997 that the introduction of the Freedom of Information Act had "begun to break down the culture of secrecy that prevailed in our society, as represented by the ubiquitous threat posed to daily life and expression by the Official Secrets Act".
Ms McGonagle said that financial awards in defamation cases in Ireland, such as the £300,000 paid to Mr Proinsias De Rossa in his action against the Sunday In- dependent, were among the highest in western Europe. Had Mr De Rossa lived in any other western European state, apart from the UK, his most likely remedy as a politician would have been the right to have any inaccurate facts about him corrected in the next issue of the newspaper.
Mr Michael Foley, lecturer in journalism at the Dublin Institute of Technology, said Irish defamation laws were the most draconian in the developed world, costing the relatively small national newspaper media about £3 million annually.