ANOTHER ROW is brewing over the political representation on RTE's Questions and Answers programme next Sunday night.
The leader of Democratic Left, Mr Proinsias De Rossa, is to write to the Director-General of RTE, Mr Bob Collins, today to protest at the omission of his party from the programme.
Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, Labour and the Progressive Democrats have been invited to participate in the programme.
RTE has instead offered Democratic Left a slot on tonight's edition of Prime Time, but the party has turned this down and is insisting that it should be allowed take part in Questions and Answers next weekend.
Democratic Left had expected to get on Questions and Answers immediately after its annual conference at the end of April. However, RTE's editor of current affairs, Mr Peter Feeney, said last night that, "because of the proximity of the general election and because they had been on the programme several times this season", it had been suggested that they wait until the election campaign got under way.
"It is true they were offered one outing on one of the four Q&A programmes screened during the election campaign. We had intended that Democratic Left would get their outing last weekend but, because RTE could not get agreement with all the political parties, that programme panel had to be changed", Mr Feeney said.
RTE now found itself with only one Q&A programme left before polling day and had offered the four panel positions to Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, Labour and the PDs, he said.
"To compensate Democratic Left for this, RTE offered the party an appearance on Prime Time. In addition to that, their leader will be on Prime Time on Monday night, in a debate with Mary Harney, and we intend to have a DL representative on the programme from Cork next Tuesday", Mr Feeney said.
In the station's view, this "more than compensated" for the problem of not being able to offer DL the place on Q&A, "If DL were to be put on Q&A, we would have three from the Government and two from the Opposition, and that was precisely what led to the difficulties last weekend."
Mr Feeney said that the station carefully monitored the number and duration of political appearances on RTE during election campaigns. These statistics were reviewed every day.
The figures showed that Democratic Left had featured on television and radio in excess of what one might have expected, given its Dail representation, Mr Feeney said. RTE had treated Democratic Left very fairly, he added.