Broadcasting: 'How's the hurdy-gurdy?' was Seán Lemass's quip to Roibeard Ó Faracháin, then controller of Radio Éireann in the 1950s. The insult to the radio service wasn't necessarily undeserved.
Radio could safely be ignored by politicians at the time. Lemass, who, in opposition in 1931, had faulted a "too timorous" Radio Éireann for avoiding "anything which might be considered controversial", seems to have promptly changed tack some months later when Fianna Fáil entered government, where Lemass was to remain for all but six of the following 34 years. During that time little impact was made by news and current affairs on radio; the period could truly be called the golden age of silent radio.
It was television which pushed out the frontiers and tackled the taboo subjects in the early 1960s. John Naughton, sometime television critic of the Observer, has suggested that The Late Late Show was one of the key factors in the transformation of modern Ireland, providing the country's "first truly national forum for the discussion of social, sexual and intellectual issues". Others made the point that, but for the show, many of its viewers would have gone to their graves without ever encountering a discussion of sex.
That the infant television service got into its stride so quickly is also remarkable. When Naughton described The Late Late Show as the "Western world's best chat show" this was as much a compliment to its audience as it was to its presenter, Gay Byrne. Irish audiences supported a more serious agenda for popular television than did viewers in other comparable countries. And Byrne himself has always insisted that broadcasters would never have imposed a discussion on a society that was not ready for it, because it would have been "fruitless to do so".
All of this seems to have taken the politicians by surprise. There is little evidence - as they deliberated on how a television service might be financed - that they anticipated just how important a role it would come to play in Irish politics in the decades ahead.
One need only quote Seán Lemass again to benchmark the starting point in this journey and to understand how the establishment of the day saw the broadcasting service in the mid-1960s, about five years after television had been launched.
Lemass told the Dáil - the context was Charles Haughey's row with the farmers - that RTÉ had been "set up by legislation as an instrument of public policy" and that consequently it was "responsible to the government", who had "overall responsibility for its conduct and especially the obligation to ensure that its programmes do not offend against the public interest or conflict with national policy as defined in legislation". It followed, he argued, that the government rejected the view that RTÉ "should be, either generally or in regard to its current affairs programmes, completely independent of government supervision".
This prompted an immediate response from the broadcasters, who ran a week of programmes concerned with freedom in broadcasting, including contributions from some key international figures such as Grace Wyndham Goldie, who had pioneered current affairs at the BBC, and veteran American broadcaster Walter Cronkite. Muiris MacConghail concluded the week by producing a programme on attempted political interference in RTÉ.
As John Horgan's book attests, the relationship between government and RTÉ management has remained fraught throughout the period. But none of this should be very surprising. Politicians often had good cause to complain, as had so many others. Broadcasting is a noisy marketplace.
What does emerge from Horgan's pages is an impressive insistence by the RTÉ bosses that if the government of the day wanted to invoke the Broadcasting Act to get on air itself or to prevent others winning access, then it had to do so transparently through Section 31 of the Act.
But this topic - and the coverage of Northern Ireland and the concerns of RTE's editorial board - form a disproportionate part of Horgan's narrative. This is because the text has been driven by the surviving written minutes of such meetings rather than by Horgan's evaluation of the impact which the broadcasts themselves made.
One would not write a history of The Irish Times based largely on the minutes of the Board. One would want to evaluate what the paper printed - and didn't - and with what results.
Television had one further dramatic impact. It challenged radio to examine its remit and its potential, to consider what it could do best and at what time of day. But radio's most senior executive of the day, Roibeard Ó Faracháin, is quoted by Horgan as believing that, whereas current affairs was the lifeblood of television, it had less place on radio, which was more suited to drama and music. Horgan comments: "His gentle, poetic voice came from another era."
What the book fails to answer is why there was so little current affairs on radio before television - Horgan devotes a mere 20 pages to the early period. And what was the impact of news and current affairs on radio and television in the past 40 years? Not easy questions to answer, but Horgan, during that period, has been a journalist, editor, broadcaster, Labour senator and TD, historian, and latterly professor of journalism at DCU. He is fair-minded and insightful when he relies on this vast experience at many points throughout the book to offer his own evaluation. The pity is that he so seldom does this.
A final point: the standard of book production from Four Courts Press is excellent and worthy of a volume such as this, which is part of the Broadcasting and Irish Society series. Would that RTÉ had ensured that all the Thomas Davis Lectures, which have been published over the years, had been produced to this standard.
Broadcasting and Public Life: RTÉ News and Current Affairs, 1926-1997 By John Horgan Four Courts Press, 244pp. €19.95
